Best and worst of M. Night Shyamalan

The Sixth Sense
Signs

The Village
Split
The Visit

The Happening
Lady in the Water


I have to watch Unbreakable.

Best - The Sixth Sense
Worst- The Happening

Best - Signs

Worst - The one where trees fart and it makes you want to kill yourself.

Best: The Sixth Sense

Pretty good: Unbreakable, Signs

Terrible: everything else

best - signs
worst - anything that isn't unbreakable, village, visit, sixth sense

Best: Signs (2002) (it's the only movie of his I mildly like)

Worst: The Village (2004) (it's pretty damn dull overall)

p.s. The Sixth Sense (1999) is quite overrated.

Still, in spite of a fall-off in quality, one of the better directors since the Millennium. Very talented, though his ego, not the bloated Last Airbender, is what wrecked his career. If I were doing an update of The American Cinema, I’d ultimately have to put him in “Strained Seriousness” (“… talented but uneven directors with the mortal sin of pretentiousness. Their ambitious projects tend to inflate rather than expound”), but with the caveat that if he hadn’t been overpraised in the first place, we wouldn’t be so critical nowadays (as Sarris wrote about Robert Rossen).

Those that I leave off the list, I haven’t yet seen.

These first four I find excellent:

1. Signs
2. The Village
3. The Sixth Sense
4. Unbreakable

… [severe drop in quality]

5. Devil (Shyamalan credited as writer-producer, not director, but the picture is as much “his” as Poltergeist is Spielberg’s and The Thing Hawks’s)
6. Lady in the Water

… [even severer drop]

7. The Last Airbender (utterly atrocious)

Best - unbreakable/split
worst - signs

not seen - lady in the water, last airbender, after earth