Signs
Mel Gibson (right) plays Graham Hess, a preacher/farmer who's lost his wife, and in the process, lost his faith. He lives with his brother Merrill and one day discovers a series of crop circles in his fields. Director M Night Shyamalan's (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable) third big-budget Hollywood film, co-starring Joaquin Phoenix as Merrill Hess and Rory Culkin (Macaulay's younger brother) as Merrill's son.
Roger Ebert
The Chicago Sun-Times
'Signs is the work of a born film-maker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has been decided, but how much has been experienced. Here is a movie in which the plot is the rhythm section, not the melody. A movie that stays free of laboured explanations and a forced climax, and is about fear in the wind, in the trees, in a dog's bark, in a little girl's reluctance to drink the water. In signs. The genius of the film is that it isn't really about crop circles, or the possibility that aliens created them as navigational aids. The purpose of the film is to evoke pure emotion through the use of skilled acting and direction, and particularly through the soundtrack. It is not just what we hear that is frightening, it is the way Shyamalan has us listening intensely when there is nothing to be heard.'
Todd McCarthy
