James McAvoy gets a dazzling actor's showcase in M. Night Shyamalan's return-to-form thriller 'Split'

Unlikely as it might seem at this point in his up-and-down career, M. Night Shyamalan proves he can still pull off a genuine surprise at the end of his unnervingly clever new thriller, "Split." The precise nature of that twist will not be revealed here, though given its mind-tickling narrative implications -- to say nothing of the wildfire-like speed of social media these days -- you can probably expect the statute of limitations on spoilers to run out faster than it did on "Bruce Willis is dead" or "Rosebud is a sled." Nevertheless, the more significant and spoiler-proof astonishment here is that Shyamalan -- after nearly a decade-long creative (and sometimes commercial) drought -- has reclaimed much of the formal precision and conceptual daring that made his earlier pictures, "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" chief among them, so memorably creepy. There is life after "After Earth." To be fair, there were already promising signs of career resurgence in the writer-director's more recent output, including his 2013 found-footage thriller, "The Visit," and the first season of the science-fiction series "Wayward Pines."