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Lady in the Water

2006

M. Night Shyamalan

Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Cindy Cheung, Sarita Choudhury ...

5.4

38,389

Fantasy The superintendent of an apartment building, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), rescues a mysterious young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) and discovers she is actually a narf, a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the treacherous journey from our world back to hers. As Cleveland falls in love with the woman, he works together with the tenants to protect his new fragile friend from the deadly creatures that are determined to ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Brian Lowry Variety	"Shyamalan has followed 'The Village' with another disappointment — a ponderous, self-indulgent bedtime tale (...) This gloomy gothic fantasy falls well short of horror"	NEG
United States	Manohla Dargis The New York Times	"One of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable (...) The weakest link in Mr. Shyamalan’s new film is its story"	NEU
United States	Jim Emerson rogerebert.com	"Shyamalan says 'Lady in the Water' grew out of a bedtime story he made up and continued improvising and embellishing for his daughters, and that's precisely the way it feels: improvised and protracted (…) Rating: ★½ (out of 4)"	NEG
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"The movie is a muddle, burdened with too many characters and a sorry lack of thrills, flair and coherence (...) It is also the work of a born filmmaker (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"	NEU
United States	Desson Thomson The Washington Post	"A captivating amalgam of mystery, thriller and mythic fantasy (...) An artist who makes it his business to push the boundaries of storytelling in Hollywood. And that's exciting."	POS
United States	Kirk Honeycutt The Hollywood Reporter	"Shyamalan does project genuine menace and suspense into this mundane location, especially in nighttime scenes. But the magic that would transport you from reality into fantasy is missing."	NEU
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"[It] is stuck with a laborious homemade mythology with no convincing inner life (…) Rating: ★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United Kingdom	Ian Freer Empire	"'Lady In The Water' behaves very oddly — to 'get it' you really have to go with it. Giamatti’s grounded charm just about gets you past those silly fairy-tale names (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	NEU

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