A comment on many bad reviews.

Rating: Null/10 (4 July 2006)

This is not about how good or bad the movie is. This is about reviewer after reviewer effectively blaming M. Night Shyamalan for not providing the "scariest movie evah" promised by the advertising campaign.
People, do try to wise up. Films get made first, and then they get promoted, invariably by entirely different people. MNS made the film he wanted to make. It had elements of suspense and horror, and mystery, and historical drama. Some of those elements were excessively played up in the advertising campaign, but that advertising campaign did not even exist until the whole movie was already in the can.
I'm not going to pass judgment here on how well MNS achieved what he set out to do, but it's patently obvious, if you sit and watch the movie with an open mind, that The Village is not a horror movie, it is a love story. Just because a movie isn't quite what you were led to believe it to have been, does not make it "the worst movie ever made". Comments like that are unjustly denigratory to a studiedly unemotional yet seething with undercurrents performance by Joaquin Phoenix, and the absolutely revelatory acting of Bryce Dallas Howard, who made Ivy Walker an unforgettably luminescent character.