Reviews

Adjectives fail this film. "Dreadful" isn't enough. "Awful" seems mild. "Stupifyingly bad" can't convey the experience of it, either. If you are familiar with the poet Helen Steiner Rice, imagine one of her poems set to film and you will begin to dimly grasp how bad, how truly bad, how amazingly bad this motion picture is. Imagine a trailer park filled with lobotomized people sitting in lawn chairs watching a version of "The Sound of Music" made on the cheap especially for them. Imagine the film being projected on a bedsheet attached with clothes pins to a wash line. Imagine the wind blowing. Imagine no one paying attention. Then imagine you are there and you are shackled to a stake in the ground so that you cannot escape the evening's entertainment unless you chew off your own foot. If you can imagine all this, you can imagine the witch's brew of butchered classical music, litter-free travelogue sterility, and lifeless robotic acting that was captured for eternity on one unlucky batch of film stock from the Kodak factory and slapped with the label, "Song of Norway." It is truly the worst film ever made. The only advantage of viewing it is that from that day forth, ANYTHING you see at the movies will look passable by comparison. And I do mean ANYTHING.

A big studio, big star film that has the look and feel of a highly personal, independent production. This is one of the finest examples of cinema storytelling that I have ever seen. All aspects: screenplay; direction; acting; photography; editing; art & design; and musical score are superb. Every person connected with this production should feel exceptionally proud, especially the director and screenwriter, M. Night Shyamalan, whose talent is the strong common thread weaving all the aforementioned ingredients together. "The Sixth Sense," in my opinion, is one of the finest films of this decade and is destined to become a classic of its genre. Mr. Shyamalan has raised the humble ghost story to the level of art, and he has done it in such a way that his film puts many so-called reality-based motion pictures to shame.