Weekly Round-Up (10/30/11 - 11/5/11)

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong) ***1/2 - An elderly woman takes a poetry class at around the same time she learns that her teenage grandson is involved in a shocking, tragic death of a young girl. This is a lovely film. It's dark and absolutely heartbreaking yet at same time oddly life-affirming as well. It's anchored by the simply outstanding performance of Yun Jeong-hie as the grandmother. This is my first taste of director Lee Chang-dong's work. I can't wait to see more.

Dracula (Tod Browning) **** - This is one of my chosen Halloween movies. This is my second or third time watching it. Yes, the effects are cheesy (you can see the strings on the phony bat!) and the scares are somewhat dated. But still, the film still has a spooky atmosphere and Bela Lugosi is still the best Dracula there is.

Repulsion (Roman Polanski) **** - This is my other Halloween film. My second time. Catherine Deneuve is a marvel as a beautiful young sexually repressed woman who slowly but surely goes batshit crazy while left alone in her London flat she shares with her sister. A magnificent piece of horror filmmaking.

The Thing (Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.) **1/2 - I came in with low expectations. This is not a remake but rather a prequel to the original John Carpenter classic 1982 shocker sci-fi horror film. Although it's nowhere near as great as the original, for what it is, it is pretty darn entertaining. Despite the fact that it borrows way too much from the John Carpenter version, we know too much about and see too much of the Thing (one of the reasons why the 1982 version is great is that we never know what the Thing actually looks like) and of course the CGI, despite the fact they tried to minimize its usage. All in all, not bad, not great but it does make me wanna watch the original again.