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This group of misfits will win you over, as will the movie. It's full of terrific performances and funny and heart-tugging human moments, and its inclusive cast of can-do characters will give you hope again in the human spirit.

One is aware watching this film that it is the work of an independently minded artist who has been given relatively free reign. In the realm of committee-created summer garbage, that's breathtaking! Unfortunately, despite many brilliant sequences and some terrific performances (the two children, Joaquin Phoenix, and Cherry Jones), the story of a minister's struggle with faith in the midst of an alien invasion, though intermittently powerful, just doesn't hang together. You're left with too many questions that linger and grow in number in the days following -- and not good ones, but rather questions like what were they doing with all that crop since no one seemed to really be farming it? The comparisons of Shyamalan to Hitchcock and Spielberg are apt, however, and the framing of almost every shot, the choice to keep most of the horror off-screen, shows an all too rare insight, taste, and intelligence.

Vivid and potentially haunting recreation of a bygone era is undermined by frequent indecipherable dialogue, impossible-to-follow story lines, and the tendency of those stories you can pick up on to be fairly predictable and familiar. The "mystery" is especially lame, and the character of the inspector seems to have required no more than ten seconds' thought on the part of its creators. The cast, of course, is impressive -- Emily Watson and Helen Mirren are particularly good -- but one cannot escape the sense that most of them are wasted here. American critics, alas, are easily seduced by British accents. There is less here than meets the eye.