All the highlights of the news from yesterday with stories on Christoph Waltz to play “significant” role in Bond 24 and ATX Television Festival to feature the reunions of cast and creator of Gilmore Girls and the writers from Dawson’s Creek.
All the highlights of the news from yesterday with stories on Neil Patrick Harris tapped to host this year’s Oscars and HBO to launch stand-alone over-the-top service in the US next year.
Stoker is a shiny, sparkling gem of cross-cultural kink-horror, made in America and starring big-named English-speaking actors, but blessed with the unmistakable brazen oddity of modern Korean master Park Chan-Wook. Park makes his English-language debut with this film, which is at once an acute, tender character study and the most twisted family drama to grace screens in years. You will never see the concept of “family ties” represented in quite the same way that Park presents it here, which is probably a good thing in the long run. But for the 99 minutes that Stoker flickers on the screen, it’s a sour dose of family anti-values that goes down positively sweet.
The name “Stoker” is synonymous with Bram Stoker, the 19th-century Gothic author best known for writing Dracula, the genre-redefining vampire novel. “Stoker” also has a second meaning, of course: to “stoke”, as in to encourage, to foster, or to promote. Both meanings have some relevance—the latter more than former—to South Korean filmmaker Chan-Wook Park’s (Thirst, The Vengeance Trilogy, Joint Security Area) English-language debut Stoker. It’s an ultra-stylish—if not quite ultra-violent—Southern Gothic psychological horror written by actor-turned-screenwriter Wentworth Miller (TV’s Prison Break) as a revisionist, modern-day take on the 1943 suspense thriller Shadow of a Doubt, a film many consider Hitchcock’s first stateside masterpiece.