I liked The Mist a lot, though I'm too much of a reader and found the original ending much more haunting (though much more open ended, it was also much more hopeful). I am a horror film fan, but tend to avoid strict slasher films.
As a reader, though, I thought Children of Men explored some themes from the end game of Herbert's The White Plague (which predated the book Children of Men by about ten years). Though stylistically quite different, the last [pregnant] woman on Earth allows the exploration of a segment of human nature, politically, socially, interpersonally. It's not often pretty.
dinah comments: "Premonition with Sandra Bullock was confusing."
Bullock was living days of her life out of sequence - time had come unstuck, either in the physical world or within her mind. I liked the film because it grapples with the nature of consciousness and reality to a certain extent, but it's point seems to be our dependence on sequence, on linear time, for coherent existing. I mean, The Power of Now is all well and good, and being in the present is an effective tool for living, but too much "mental suicide" and we lose the thread of coherency that much of our lives depend on (we are, in the end, physical creatures with cyclical dependencies, in our physiology, psychology and social constructus).
Sadly, in the end The Premonition drives home the idea of fate in a way that (to a reader) has become all too stale.
Since I like playing with the nature of reality, I liked The Matrix. All that we know about the physical world is through our sensory apparatus. Fool that apparatus, and you provide a false reality - or at least a manufactured one. Perhaps they are all manufactured? The subsequent films rather degenerated into purely simplistic political intrigue and then action/adventure - satisfying in a different way, but not intellectually engaging for me.
I also liked The Golden Compass, and hope the rest of the books are filmed - the third in particular presents an exposition on consciousness (and "God") that's worth a look. But the story is a difficult marriage of pageantry and philosophy, and typical filmgoers will not relate well to it. The mainstream attraction is invested in the personality of the heroine, a near delinquent girl, which presents its own challenges.
M. Night Whatshisname is certainly an acquired taste, and he takes his own time to tell a story, I think hoping we are as engrossed in his characters as he is. This doesn't always work for me (Signs), but sometimes does (Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense). I liked The Village a lot - for the obvious reasons, the credulous youngsters being duped for "noble reasons" by the shortsighted, impractical elders - and I liked Lady of the Water for its fairy tale elements, its too brief sarcastic comment on critics, and its admittedly too-slow exploration of how we humans work so hard to put pieces of reality into a coherent worldview, only to get it right when we stop forcing the pieces to fit. In the end, the film is another marraige of disparate elements that come together to entertain, but the pieces don't fit very well together and take a long time to to even that.
