Stoker
Director: Park Chan-wook
Screenwriter: Wentworth Miller
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman, Dermot Mulroney
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Rated R | 99 Minutes
Release Date: March 8, 2013 (Limited)

Directed by Park Chan-wook, Stoker stars Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) as India Stoker, whose 18th birthday is turned upside down after her loving father, Richard (Dermot Mulroney), dies in a horrific car accident.

The quiet and reclusive India is left with her estranged, unstable mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) in their secluded mansion. At Richard’s funeral, Evelyn and India are introduced to Richard’s charming, charismatic brother Charlie (Matthew Goode), who has spent his life jet-setting around the globe.

After the service, Uncle Charlie (a reference to Joseph Cotten’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt) decides to stay indefinitely to help support his brother’s family, much to Evelyn’s delight and India’s displeasure.

Park Chan-wook, the South Korean director best known for his films Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, and Thirst, makes his English-language debut with Stoker, a dark, atmospheric film that feels as Hitchcockian as it does Kubrickian. There is a technical precision in Chan-wook’s movie that forces you to focus on every little detail – and the director’s signature visual style enhances the mystery and the characters caught up in it.

We first got a glimpse of Oldboy director Park Chan-wook‘s Stoker a week ago. In it, the trailer was intent on selling Nicole Kidman playing a cold mother who is sending a threatening message to her daughter. As bone chilling as that speech was, the latter half of the trailer revealed that India (Mia Wasikowska) was no ordinary girl. Her quiet nature seemed to have got the attention of the uncle (Matthew Goode) she never knew. From there it spiraled into a psychological thriller that bares a resemblance to something Alfred Hitchcock would have directed.

Now a new trailer reveals India’s point of view. Most of the trailer focuses on what motivates this quiet and stoic high school student. We also get to hear a little bit more from that speech Kidman made in the first trailer. Check out the latest trailer for Stoker below.

Oldboy director Park Chan-wook is taking his work to the States. Chan-wook introduced himself to global moviegoers with films like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Now he is gearing up for his first English-language directed film, Stoker. The first trailer for Stoker has finally arrived online.

Check out the first trailer here below.

The cold chill that Nicole Kidman gives off creates the kind of tension that is rarely seen in movies. Kidman plays Evelyn, a widower to the Stoker family, who lacks the capacity to warm up to the Stoker family patriarchal daughter, India (Mia Wasikowska). Things only get worse when Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) pays the two a visit. And by worse I mean creepy worse.

Watchmen
Director’s Cut Blu-ray
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Matthew Goode
Warner Home Video
Release Date: July 21, 2009

This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!’…and I’ll whisper, ‘no.’

What would you do in order to ensure the safety of all mankind? Would you sacrifice millions of lives if it meant saving billions of other lives and creating a perfect and peaceful world? This is the impossibly difficult scenario placed in front of a small group of crime fighters known simply as Watchmen.

Watchmen is based on the timeless graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The book is the only graphic novel on Time magazine’s top 100 novels of all time — a truly epic feat for its platform. For many years, the novel was also called “unfilmable” by most people who strongly believed that no one could faithfully and accurately adapt the complex story and characters into a movie. Director Zack Snyder was the man to finally try and accomplish this impossible feat, and even better, he did it because he didn’t want to see anyone else try and fail miserably. Any time a director takes on a project simply to protect the legacy of of the film’s source material, you know you’re in for some top-notch passionate filmmaking.

Watchmen
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson
Rated R
Release date: March 6, 2009

This movie should not exist. There have been rumors of its making finally happening for many years. How many acclaimed visionary filmmakers have tried and failed to make this movie? Terry Gilliam, Paul Greengrass, and Darren Aronofsky are the most well known. I’ve been reading the reports of development and false starts in the pages of magazines like Wizard and entertainment web sites since I was a kid. The material first came to me more than a decade ago after I had read about it for many years and after digesting the collected volume in a single setting I stared off into space wondering how in the hell they could ever make a movie of this. It was impossible, a mad folly that would frighten even Werner Herzog. There was just too much in this book to absorb. I myself even attempted to create a movie version in my head just for fun and see how it would play. It practically fried my brain, but then again I wasn’t a director or a screenwriter.

What brave soul would take on Watchmen, the landmark comic miniseries created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that ran for twelve remarkable issues from 1986-1987 and has been credited with ushering in a darker and more introspective age of comic book storytelling, and not just live to win to tell the tale but conquer the bloody thing? Why did George Leigh Mallory attempt to climb Mount Everest 75 years ago and die in the process? “Because,” as he said in an interview with the New York Times in 1923, “it’s there.” But his son John also had something to add: “To me the only way you achieve a summit is to come back alive. The job is half done if you don’t get down again.” Zack Snyder, the former music video and commercial director who made a blazing feature directorial debut with the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and followed it with the blockbuster 2007 adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, took on the mountain that defeated many a great filmmaker before him and reached the goddamned summit.