Nobody requires plausibility from a movie like “Knowing,” which features slender blond aliens, intimations of apocalypse, clairvoyant children and Nicolas Cage as an astrophysicist. If the thing manages to avoid complete preposterousness, the audience can still have a good time.

Roger Ebert is definitely in the minority in his assessment of Knowing. The Chicago Sun-Times critic often finds himself at odds with other reviewers, but in this case he's standing alone against just about every one of them, who give the film one of the worst drubbings of the year. Ebert awards the film four stars and writes that it "is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome." Contrast those words with these that conclude Kyle Smith's review in the New York Post: "The movie begins shameless, grows stupid and winds up silly. If the ending had less of the air of a crackpot religion and more pretentiousness, you could almost call it Shyamalanish." Ty Burr in the Boston Globe nearly echoes those words: "Knowing," he writes, "starts off mildly ridiculous, ascends to the full-blown ludicrous, and finally sails boldly off the edge of the absolutely preposterous." Christy Lemire of the Associate Press writes that it is "an early contender for worst movie of the year." But A.O. Scott in the New York Times notes that the audience he saw the movie with appeared to be having a good time. However, he added, "If your intention is to make a brooding, hauntingly allegorical terror-thriller, it's probably not a good sign when spectacles of mass death and intimations of planetary destruction are met with hoots and giggles." »