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OFCS Rating: 27% Rotten |
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D | "With Lady, it appears as though Shyamalan has completely jumped ship into a pit of egocentrism, and it ain't pretty." |
| FromTheBalcony |
| Bill Clark |
2.5/5 | "All throughout it's running time, Lady in the Water tends to make up its rules as it goes along...out of a sheer need for plotting or cleverness." |
| DVD Verdict |
| Bill Gibron |
| "What is most annoying about "Lady" is that no one ever considers the possibility that nothing magical is actually occurring.The film starts out silly and just gets sillier." |
| Beyond Hollywood |
| Brian Holcomb |
7/10 | "A genre-defying, form-snubbing plunge into an overly sentimental, proudly nonsensical world." |
| Bloody Disgusting |
| Brian Juergens |
D+ | "If Shyamalan wants to slap around film critics, hey, fine by me; but to sacrifice your entire film to do so reeks of a director who could stand to hear a little more "no" in his life." |
| FilmJerk.com |
| Brian Orndorf |
D+ | "Apologists for the categorically inadequate M. Night Shyamalan have their work cut out defending yet another cinematic killjoy from the 'auteur' whose high box office receipts do not reflect the ineptitude of his filmmaking skills." |
| ColeSmithey.com |
| Cole Smithey |
| "Story's whiter-than-white skin, bloody cuts, color-shifting hair, and need to keep wet make her a bizarre amalgamation of fantasies, alternately "male" and "childish."" |
| PopMatters |
| Cynthia Fuchs |
52/100 | "Cobbled together, ramshackle fantastical nonsense." |
| Apollo Guide |
| Dan Jardine |
2/5 | "Somebody might want to mention to Shyamalan that taking potshots at critics in films rarely works. Remember Roland Emmerich's lame attack on Siskel and Ebert in his awful reworking of 'Godzilla?'" |
| eFilmCritic.com |
| Dan Lybarger |
1/5 | "I just want to punch this movie right in the face." |
| eFilmCritic.com |
| David Cornelius |
C- | "M. Night's self-absorption is approaching the level of irritation -- here it has all the subtlety of a brick applied to the head." |
| EDGE Boston |
| David Foucher |
2.5/4 | "A watery. ladylike, and extremely tall tale indeed, but one well within the reach of its fine cast (which, oddly enough, includes its director)." |
| rec.arts.movies.reviews |
| David N. Butterworth |
3/4 | "...ultimately feels like the sort of movie that'll improve immeasurably on repeat viewings..." |
| Reel Film Reviews |
| David Nusair |
D | "The only frightening thing about this horror fantasy film was in how bad it was." |
| Ozus' World Movie Reviews |
| Dennis Schwartz |
2/4 | "Concludes with a big 'huh?' that leaves one questioning what the point was." |
| TheMovieBoy.com |
| Dustin Putman |
1/5 | "El director toca fondo con una fábula para adultos tan ridícula como pretenciosa. Solo Paul Giamatti logra mantener a flote este fiasco." |
| Uruguay Total |
| Enrique Buchichio |
C+ | "When it's over you think: 'Really? That was it?' Maybe that's the twist." |
| EricDSnider.com |
| Eric D. Snider |
1.5/4 | "The one prescient thing associated with the soothsaying around his self-appointed savior character is that if he continues along the path he's on now, someone is going to take him out and it won't just be a film critic." |
| eFilmCritic.com |
| Erik Childress |
D+ | "It's silly. It's just silly, and it's a shame." |
| Film Blather |
| Eugene Novikov |
D | "You won't see anything else like it this summer, and you'll be really glad about that." |
| One Guy's Opinion |
| Frank Swietek |
4/5 | "A spiritual story that challenges us to deeply listen and to let its mysteries work on our hearts and souls until we discover what part is ours to play.
" |
| Spirituality and Practice |
| Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat |
1.5/4 | "For the most part, however, Lady in the Water comes across as a movie that's too bad to be good, and not bad enough to be so bad that it's good." |
| ReelViews |
| James Berardinelli |
1.5/5 | "More than anything, Lady in the Water is a work of great hubris--a jaw-dropping exercise in which a populist artist tests his audience's limits. Will they swallow this pill whole or spit it back only halfway down?" |
| Q Network Film Desk |
| James Kendrick |
| "High on talk-heavy exposition and low on actual scares and thrills . . ." |
| Sci-Fi Movie Page |
| James O'Ehley |
2/4 | "A well-crafted and well-intentioned misstep." |
| Palo Alto Weekly |
| Jeanne Aufmuth |
3/10 | "Shyamalan might've been onto something if Lady in the Water were, say, a satire of Scientology; instead, it's a mission for a bedtime story, a badly told fairy tale." |
| ReelTalk Movie Reviews |
| Jeffrey Chen |
4/5 | "As a comedy it's hugely optimistic and as a drama it's wonderfully emotional and that we're afforded the opportunity to make the call for one or the other for ourselves makes this a very clever film." |
| FilmFocus |
| Joe Utichi |
4/10 | "Once the filmmaker spells everything out for us in the first fifteen or twenty minutes, the rest of the plot simply unfolds in a jumbled series of incomprehensible events." |
| DVDTown.com |
| John J. Puccio |
| "Lady in the Water is like a convenience store, with the director filling his basket with easy story fixes and unnecessary junk food." |
| Light Views |
| John Larsen |
9/10 | "Mysterious and sweet. It's scary and it's funny, and it's deeply moving, too. That makes Water a rare exception in terms of cinematic hybrids, but it also represents Shyamalan's best effort since 2000's Unbreakable." |
| Planet Sick-Boy |
| Jon Popick |
| "A Narf is a sea nymph along the lines of a mermaid, but without the fishy parts. She is a pale, ethereal thing named Story, and she looks like Mia Farrow on Clorox." |
| In the Dark |
| Jonathan F. Richards |
3/5 | "review in Greek" |
| Movies for the Masses |
| Joseph Proimakis |
4.5/5 | "The marketing campaign is superb for this movie: it shows the beauty and the mystery of the story without the actually incredibly complex structure of it...full of magic and beauty." |
| Cinerina |
| Karina Montgomery |
3/4 | "A gaping psychic wound, a blood-spattered, pulsating tumor ripped violently from both its creator's head and, more fascinatingly, his heart, then planted onscreen, raw and unfettered, for all to come and see." |
| Slant Magazine |
| Keith Uhlich |
| "A director's love letter to himself, the martyred, fashionably-dressed messiah whose work may someday save the world if only we'd let it." |
| Pretentious Musings |
| Kevin Koehler |
4/4 | "I laughed, I cried, I jumped in my seat, I dreamed. It's E.T. all over again." |
| Montreal Film Journal |
| Kevin N. Laforest |
1.5/4 | "The result is a soggy swamp of nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahing, its only grace notes are Giamatti's fine, nuanced performance as Heep and Christopher Doyle's handsome cinematography." |
| TV Guide's Movie Guide |
| Maitland McDonagh |
1.5/4 | "What should be a wondrous excursion into Shyamalan's version of a modern fairy tale is undermined by the writer/director's bitter tone." |
| Mark Reviews Movies |
| Mark Dujsik |
| "[I]t's easier to appreciate Lady in the Water than it is to embrace it emotionally.... [It] wants us to be sad and hopeful and in awe about a lot of things, but it didn't make me actually feel much of anything." |
| Flick Filosopher |
| MaryAnn Johanson |
0/4 | "What the hell do I know--I'm a lowly scrunt-bait critic deigning to question the very Vessel of Story." |
| Mr. Brown's Movies |
| Michael Dequina |
1.5/5 | "It's thin stuff, stretched out to nearly two hours by Shyamalan's faith in his own abilities, but not much else." |
| Goatdog's Movies |
| Michael W. Phillips, Jr. |
0.5/4 | "Have you ever been approached by someone who was really drunk, and they tell you some rambling, incoherent story? Well, that's what watching this movie is like." |
| Aisle Seat |
| Mike McGranaghan |
C | "Stunningly self-indulgent claptrap" |
| Movie Mom at Yahoo! Movies |
| Nell Minow |
D | "A case study of an increasingly defensive filmmaker falling off the auteurist deep end." |
| Lessons of Darkness |
| Nick Schager |
1.5/5 | "If Shyamalan is going to use his kids as a focus group for future projects, maybe he should start making movies for Nickelodeon already and stop wasting our time." |
| Film Threat |
| Pete Vonder Haar |
3/5 | "Beautifully made and thoroughly intriguing, but it feels made up as it goes along." |
| Shadows on the Wall |
| Rich Cline |
4/5 | "Ignore the critics on this movie. Yeah, I am one. Which means I'm telling you to ignore me, too." |
| eFilmCritic.com |
| Rob Gonsalves |
D | "A tedious, astonishingly irritating march through scene after scene of quasi-Jungian horse flop." |
| Flipside Movie Emporium |
| Rob Vaux |
B | "I've not been overly impressed with Shyamalan's last few films, but this one is better." |
| Laramie Movie Scope |
| Robert Roten |
2.5/4 | "Lady would be nothing without the man that rides to her rescue, Paul Giamatti." |
| Charlotte Weekly |
| Sean O'Connell |
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OFCS Rating: 27% Rotten |
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