A solidly crafted middlebrow thriller with the edges softened for maximum demographic appeal, The Sixth Sense is better than its sickly kid-sees-dead-people rival Stir of Echoes (which it buried at the box-office like a smaller, weaker siamese twin after separation surgery) but was certainly not one of the best 20 movies of 1999. The much-ballyhooed Surprise Ending does prove a mild surprise to most viewers, and holds up to a second viewing--but it's a gimmick achieved not by challenging the viewer to make sense of "clues" (as the picture's massive p.r. machinery, visible in full strength on the dvd, terms elements of early scenes) but rather by lulling the viewer into critical apathy about everything beyond the kid. To explain this more carefully would necessitate revealing the Secret; the remarkable compliance of critics in refraining from doing this, and their subsequent inability to dwell on the shallowness of the movie's use of its sole interesting philosophical conceit, no doubt helps explains The Sixth Sense's charmed ascendancy to an improbable best picture Oscar nomination. The acting nominations garnered by Haley Joel Osmont and Toni Collette are somewhat more plausible, and their striking performances lift the movie out of generic horror-flick limbo, while Bruce Willis is satisfactory as the father-figure child-psychologist. The New-Agey dead-people-are-people-too therapist-heal-thyself resolution of the movie's sparse but effective scare content makes the film more reminiscent of Ghost than of the truly chilling kid-sees-dead-people scenes in The Shining (an example of a horror film that actually explores its own ideas). The Sixth Sense is, as Shyamalan gleefully details on one of the dvd's added tracks, a carefully-constructed cash cow; it is not, however, as another crew member there intones, 'a religious experience.'