Popular reviews

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 82

  (No explicit spoilers, but spoiler-sensitive readers should watch the movie first and come back after.)

  A monstrous crisis in South Korean national identity.

  On the surface, The Host looks a lot like any other monster movie. It showcases an evil beast hell-bent on the destruction of the local population. And yet, even here director Joon-ho Bong refuses the conventions of the genre he’s working within. He shows us the monster right from the start (almost in the first scene) and almost always in broad daylight rather than hiding the special effects in dark nighttime shots. Rather than glorifying the monster’s destruction (the disaster porn model) or reveling in the fear it creates (the horror model), he pitches the film at…

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  Review by k(arst)en ★★★★½

  will consider not dumping chemicals in the river moving forward

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  Review by 👽 Zara 👽 ★★★★½ 7

  the real virus is america amirite folks

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  Review by hollie amanda ★★★

  bong joon-ho said of course i support america’s rights... america’s rights to shut the fuck up!

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 1

  All of Bong Joon-ho’s movies are about monsters, some more literally than others. In “Memories of Murder,” the monster is the boogeyman, ripped from the headlines and hiding in the darkness. In “Snowpiercer,” the monster is the abstract force of capitalism, rotting us from the inside out as we eat each other to survive and maintain some semblance of order at the end of the world. And in “The Host,” the wild 2006 genre mash-up that firmly established Bong as a creative force of nature and afforded him the cache to make “Mother” in 2009, the monster is… well, it’s an actual fucking monster, with slimy skin and a prehensile tail and a sweet tooth for small children.

  The special…

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  Review by maria ★★★★ 5

  why am i crying over a monster movie, bong joon-ho you have done it again!

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  Review by Branson Reese 1

  Early on when the Steve Buscemi monster is attacking people in the park there’s a quick shot of a dog just going to town on its owner. Seems unrelated to the monster, the dog was just looking for an opening to kill its master. Right on.

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  Review by oppie ★★★½ 2

  this movie been around since 2006 and some humans still litter smh hope y'all get eaten by giant catfish monster

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  Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★

  I will never dump formaldehyde down the sink again

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  Review by Ciara ★★★★½ 22

  What do you do if you're Bong Joon-ho and you've just made Memories of Murder, one of the single most devastating portrayals of police brutality and serial killers ever put to screen? (seriously, my eyes are welling up thinking about it. Watch it.)

  The answer is go for an insane comedy-drama monster movie about a fucked up family who're on a mission to hunt down a monster causing mayhem and murder on the banks of the Han river in Seoul.

  Throw in some clever political commentary about police incompetence in Korea, the US military's flippantly arrogant policies abroad (and how the Korean government typically kowtows to them), and government bunglings in general for good measure.

  Test the family at every…

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  Review by Taylor Williams ★★★★ 2

  The best way to describe this movie is that the American scientist ordering his assistant to pour formaldehyde down the drain is more jarring than a monster popping out of the river and killing people. It’s whacky and stupid but subversive and biting, and while the beginning had me a little unsure of how to feel about the tonal blend, it developed into something really neat.

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  Review by The Reel House ★★★★ 8

  The inclusion of Song Kang-Ho in any film...... automatically makes it a better film.