signature twist ending disappoints." At Metacritic, the film holds a score of 44 out of 100 based on 40 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "C" on scale of A+ to F. Roger Ebert gave the film one star and wrote: "The Village is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn ... To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It was all a dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore." Ebert named the film the tenth worst film of 2004 and subsequently put it on his "Most Hated" list. There were also comments that the film, while raising questions about conformity in a time of "evil," did little to "confront" those themes. Slate's Michael Agger commented that Shyamalan was continuing in a pattern of making "sealed-off movies that [fall] apart when exposed to outside logic." The movie had a number of admirers. Critic Jeffrey Westhoff commented that though the film had its shortcomings, these did not necessarily render it a bad movie, and that "Shyamalan's orchestration of mood and terror is as adroit as ever." Philip Horne of The Daily Telegraph in a later review noted "this exquisitely crafted allegory of American soul-searching seems to have been widely misunderstood." The film has received some additional positive reviews since its release including Emily St. James of Vox and Chris Evangelista of SlashFilm who thought it was one of Shyamalan's best films, Adam Chitwood of Collider who praised the ending, the performances of Howard, Phoenix, and Hurt, and the cinematography, and Kayleigh Donaldson of Syfy Wire who praised the cinematography, and said, "...[the film] stands as one of the strongest representations of Shyamalan’s ethos, for better or worse." Carlos Morales of IGN argued that the film was misunderstood at the time of its release because it was mismarketed as a horror film, and also because of audience expectations that had been built up by Shyamalan's three previous films. "The real twist was that the movie they wanted wasn't the