You know that a filmmaker has returned to fine form when you’re compelled to a second viewing during a movie’s first run.  Maybe even soon going back for a third.

After a few disappointments (including 2006’s bewildering and nigh-incomprehensible Lady In The Water) my interest had grown wary – to put it mildly – in M. Night Shyamalan’s work.  The wunderkind who in 1999 brought us The Sixth Sense and then Unbreakable followed by Signs and The Village (a film I will never be ashamed to defend) had been hailed as “his generation’s Steven Spielberg.”

But then Shyamalan kinda wandered off the reservation.  Went weird.  Became the strange relative who packs up and goes into places that only his deepest id seems to understand.  Sometimes he comes back from the quest with renewed vision and perspective.  Sometimes he doesn’t.  Sometimes he fails to come back at all.