It’s time for a quality thriller that you won’t be able to predict. Korean writer/director, Joon-ho Bong (The Host) brings us Mother and tells a story the good old fashioned way. The movie stars the veteran Korean actress, Hye-ja Kim, as an obsessive mother who has to try and save her mentally handicapped son. When the police failed, she won’t. The story is a combination of the dysfunctional relationship between a mother and son and a murder mystery, but done in a manner that only a foreign director can do.

Check out the players, the plot, the good, and the bad below…

Continue Reading

It seems as though every genre is covered this week with new movies coming out. If you are looking for action, you should check out Paul Greengrass’s film Green Zone starring Matt Damon as a U.S. Army officer who goes rogue as he hunts for Weapons of Mass Destruction in an unstable region. Looking for drama? You can go the romantic route and watch Remember Me starring Twilight’s very own hunk Robert Pattinson and Emilie de Ravin. Or you can go the murder mystery route and watch Joon-Ho Bang’s crime thriller, Mother about a mother who will stop at nothing to prove her handicap son did not rape or murder the woman for which he is accused.

Continue Reading

Joon-ho Bong is the creative mind behind new dramatic, thriller Mother, starring Hye-ja Kim as an obsessive mother on a mission to clear her mentally handicapped son’s name of a murder. Bong both wrote and directed this murder mystery which that the generic crime, murder mystery and turns it into something completely new and intriguing to watch. We were lucky enough to have a chance to sit down to a roundtable with Bong and discuss the film along with his current project the English remake of the wildly successful Korean film The Host.

Continue Reading

One of the more anticipated titles in this year’s AFI fest was Mother (Madeo), subject of excited word of mouth from Cannes, Toronto and Karlovy Vary, and the fourth film from South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho (The Host). Its opening, with an old woman walking slowly through then dancing in a field, has little to do with what follows, but does introduce the film’s gentle semi-absurdist sense of humour and the captivating presence of Kim Hya-ja. Her performance is central to the movie, as the title suggests, and she is mesmerizing without a jot of overplaying or sympathy-begging, in her search for the perpetrator of the crime for which her slow-witted son has been lazily convicted (Won Bin, also excellent).

Continue Reading

It is finally upon us – as I type the crowds are thronged outside the Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the American Film Institute Film Festival Opening Gala and North American Premiere of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion fable Fantastic Mr Fox (already covered by Screencrave from the London Film Festival – ahead of the game as usual).

Continue Reading