If you enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, you will most likely dig his new film, Signs.  While it's a lot more manipulative and slightly more hokey than his previous two films, Signs is everything a big summer blockbuster ought to be: Entertaining, derivative, full of big stars and shaky under post-viewing scrutiny.  Even though a lot of people at my preview screening didn't think the movie worked, it was the quietest and most freaked-out I've seen an audience since What Lies Beneath.  You'll forget there's anything but an edge to your seat.

Signs is set in Buck County, Pennsylvania (just outside Shyamalan's usual Philadelphia setting) and begins with farmer and former pastor Graham Hess (Mel Gibson, We Were Soldiers) startled from a dead sleep.  He instantly knows something is amiss, and thanks to the eerie photography, so do we.  Hess and younger brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix, Quills), a Dave Kingman-esque minor league baseball reject, discover a giant, intricate pattern carved into their huge cornfield.  Graham assumes it's the work of a prankster, even after he clicks on the television and discovers similar crop circles have appeared throughout the world.  Strange second-hand stories told via the local sheriff (Cherry Jones, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) do nothing to make Graham feel any differently.

I should mention something about Graham's background, though recounting the whole story gives away too much of the plot.  His wife (Patricia Kalember) died six months prior to Signs' first scene in an incident that made Graham shelve both his collar and belief in God.  He's also become incredibly protective of his children, asthmatic 10-year-old Morgan (Rory Culkin, You Can Count On Me) and five-year-old Bo (Abigail Breslin), who can't see dead people but can definitely see something that everyone else can't.

That "something" is another touchy subject when it comes to revealing any of Signs' secrets.  Though parts of the film are extremely reminiscent of the way extra-terrestrials were handled in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (read: believable and scary), it is in no way straight science fiction that only Trekkies will appreciate.  That said, the film's pace crawls along pretty leisurely, often making it seem like a Robert Zemeckis version of Independence Day.

There are some things that don't work, like Shyamalan casting himself in the biggest non-Hess-family role (he had tiny Hitchcockish cameos in his other films), and the last reel's painfully unnecessary explanation of the foreshadowing of the first 90 minutes, which is already quite heavy-handed. The ending seemed like a hodgepodge of Night of the Living Dead, Panic Room and The Natural all rolled into one, which, only upon reflection, is bothersome (but while it was happening, my hands were covering my eyes).

Gibson's performance is his best in at least five years (but that's not saying much, considering the dreck he's made over that period) and the kids are every bit as good as Haley Joel Osment was in Sense (Shyamalan's knack for directing children earned him a shot at helming the third Harry Potter installment, which he turned down).  The real star here, however, is Shyamalan, who not only wrote a fairly original script (steeped in ideas borrowed from a wide variety of his favorite films) but once again directs his ass off. Establishing mood via slow camera movement and a lack of music, Shyamalan can make even the most benign setting seem instantly creepy.  And he's very good at using comedy to alleviate the tension he creates as well.

1:50 -

for some frightening moments