Metacritic reviews

Borrowing heavily from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Shyamalan tries to lighten his trademark gloomy tone -- and almost kills the suspense he's working so hard to achieve.

Mr. Shyamalan is a new national treasure, as attuned to our sensibilities and everyday life as Steven Spielberg.

A beautifully crafted, white-knuckle, roller-coaster ride of old-school filmmaking -- the kind that believes that the less you show, the better.

Even if Signs suffers a little from uneven pacing and mismatched tones of reverent homage (to "The Birds" and "War of the Worlds"), soul-searching and silly comedy, the jokes are clever, the tension continual and expertly calibrated, and the performances -- are both deep and moving.

For a big-budget Hollywood feature, the film places an unusually high amount of stock in the audience's imagination; not since "The Others" or "The Blair Witch Project" have so many shocks been indirect or kept teasingly out of view.

It's a high-octane doomsday vision built almost entirely around our sense of anticipation, and that's both its strength and its weakness.

The problem with Signs is not that the movie is pretentious -- or ambitious -- enough to try to combine "The Book of Job" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The problem is that Signs manages to be both so terribly serious and so unimportant at the same time.

Shyamalan wants to be the metaphysical poet of movies, but he's dangerously close to becoming its O. Henry. The best surprise ending he could give us in his next movie would be no surprise ending at all.

Even though he shows some master touches throughout the movie, Shyamalan flits a little too lightly across the surface, like a pond skater.

Promised to be the season's thoughtful action picture, turns out to have few thoughts and no thrills.