M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense featured a nicely intense performance from a child actor, some creepy atmospherics, a neat twist that makes you want to sit up and applaud for O all of two seconds. Unbreakable I found more interesting because Shyamalan had shrugged off his mainstream appeal and started to show his true colors: a comic-book freak who takes his superheroes seriously, to the point of spending the budget of a major motion picture telling an origin story.
Shyamalan's latest-- where Mel Gibson and family find funny going-ons in the middle of their cornfield-- shows no sign whatsoever of him apologizing for his career to date. His first movie was a hit his second an interesting failure (though not to my eyes, not quite); he's on to something, he believes, and in Signs he wants to make believers of all of us.