Popular reviews

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  Review by Tara ★ 26

  Mark Wahlberg gets out acted by a plant.

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  Review by Wes ★ 4

  this isnt a movie you watch but a movie you survive

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  Review by Matt Singer ★ 3

  Certainly one of the more unorthodox episodes of THE NEW GIRL I've seen.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 21

  87

  Re-watch after re-watch, I try to make sense of The Happening, and in every instance, I fail. Is that the fault of the movie like so many believe? I'm not so sure. Its inexorable link of absurdity and sheer horror is not to be overlooked. M. Night Shyamalan and DP Tak Fujimoto team up for their third collaboration, and they don't fuck around. All of the agonizing close-ups and crystal-clear wide shots of fields and trees blowing in the wind operate to serve the same function: an evocation of the indescribable. These characters don't know what's happening to them, but it *is* happening. Very indicative of a post-9/11 world. Shyamalan is fascinated by this. How do people react when…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★½ 6

  "Can you believe how crappy people are?"

  Fear of a crisis with no rational solution quickly mutates into fear of irrationality itself. It's everywhere, completely unpredictable and inescapable. You might as well run away from the wind. Shyamalan's too clunky a writer to quite pull off the tone here, which may be why a lot of folks missed that this is trying to be knowingly funny without tipping its hand at all (not assisted by an already-overly-earnest Wahlberg being directed to play everything entirely straight). But the visual precision once again comes to the rescue. The people are either crammed into stifling interior spaces or minimized in green, leafy outdoor ones, basically filling every single environment with the story's twin…

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  Review by dani ★ 16

  Some memorable quotes out of the context from M. Night Shyamalan's magnum opus:

  "It makes you kill yourself."

  "You should be more interested in science, Jake. You know why? Because your face is perfect"

  "Take an interest in science."

  "Can you believe how crappy people are?"

  "I don't like to show my emotions either."

  "I forgot where I am."

  "I need a second, okay!? Why can't anybody give me a goddamn second!?"

  "Why you eyeing my lemon drink?"

  "Don't take my daughter's hands ubless you mean it."

  "Plastic. I'm talking to a plastic plant. I'm still doing it."

  "We're packing hot dogs for the road. You know, hot dogs get a bad rep. They gotta cool shape, they got protein."

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  Review by trin ½ 7

  why do they speak like that

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★ 5

  Haven't seen this since high school when I remember joining in the pile-on of how ridiculous the whole thing was but years later many of its creepier images like the bodies falling, the lawnmower, the suicide oner, etc have stuck with me so I decided to give it another go. Still has this strange tonal whiplash courtesy of the combination of flatly sincere performances, bizarre writing that gestures towards old B-movies and a terrifying, modern immediacy to Fujimoto's photography (especially when the sudden, grisly acts of violence occur) but I have to admit it hits harder during a literal pandemic. Captures a very specific, genuinely chilling mood of unreality amidst social breakdown and on rewatch it's clear the movie is not inept but has a perverse sense of humor about human confusion and panic that sometimes got a bit lost in translation.

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  Review by DirkH ★½ 38

  So after a couple of five star reviews here I decided to give this a rewatch to see if I had missed anything.

  Nope.

  
  Sorry guys, it's really, really bad. It's not a comedy, not even by accident. It's not a satire or homage to the genre. It's not meta aware or tongue in cheek funny.

  It's bland, unbelievably poorly scripted and the acting is simply uniformly awful.

  This has nothing to do with Shyamalan, it has everything to do with the fact that this film, bar perhaps a scene or two, fails on all levels imaginable.

  And with Mr. Wahlberg whose high pitched whiney whisperings are torture to my ears. Yes, he even outshined Zooey in crappiness.

  I'm off to hug and French kiss my plants expecting a better time than with this rewatch.

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  Review by adambolt ★

  has anyone made the joke of this movie making you want to kill yourself yet

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  Review by #1 gizmo fan ★ 4

  making zooey deschanel look ugly was this movies greatest crime

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  Review by daniel goldhaber 5

  Maybe Shyamalan's best? On par with Lynch, this is a nightmarish rendering of the America of the aughts. Maybe he got too close to our fears, but the way that people are unable to distinguish media-sold "terrorism" from the actual apocalyptic consequences of climate change is prescient. The model home is maybe the crux of what unlocks this movie. We're so keen on destroying nature in order to build monuments to ourselves. The synthetic meets the organic.