Reviews

What does an African Muslim refugee living in France share with a white Christian widow from Great Britain? - The longing search of their missing children after the London bombings in 2005.

With gentle and aesthetic camera movements and slow action progress Rachid Bouchareb portrays two distinct cultures - but as the movie goes on they turn out not to be that different after all. Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté) left his six year old son Ali with his wife in Africa to work as a woodsman In France. When he - many years later – gets a call from he's worried wife in Africa telling him that she hasn't heard from their son - now living in London - since the bombings, Ousmane travels to London right away to look for him. While the mystic Ousmane wanders around the desert streets of London for hints and clues about his unknown son he comes across the widowed mother Elisabeth (Brenda Blethyn) several times – who's more or less doing the same thing concerning her daughter. It sooner turns out that their children know/knew each other and together they search for answers.

London River (2009) is both a thrilling drama and a balanced picture of the suffering families in the shadow of the London terror-attacks. It's the movie that Hollywood unfortunately never got after 9/11.

South Korean director Chan-Wook Park - best known for his vengeance trilogy including the highly rated Oldboy (2003) - explores the life of a vampire priest in his newest movie Thirst (Bakjwi, 2009).

A catholic hospital priest (Kang ho soon) volunteers for a deadly virus experiment in hope of contributing something good to the world. He eventually gets the infection, breaks out with the symptoms (Coughing up blood, abscesses etc.) while waiting around to die - but when the doctors pump new blood into his veins on the operation table, he miraculously survives and his symptoms disappears right away. The priest is the only survivor out of 500 volunteers infected, and as soon as he gets discharged from the laboratory his reputation as a modern saint and healer spreads around the country and he soon gets various approaches from sick people with dying diseases. The priest discovers that in order to keep his health stable he needs to drink human blood on daily bases which he can maintain without killing by stealing blood on the hospital he is working at. When he bumps into an old childhood friend (Ha-Kyun Shin) and his family his situation becomes worse. He falls in love with the childhood friends beautiful wife (Ok-Bin Kim) and together they build up a dangerously and bizarre relationship which eventually reaches a point of no return.

With an ethical and aesthetic touch to a mainstream genre Thirst is a good alternative for a vampire/horror movie. It contains Lots of traditional splatter, horrifying bloodsucking scenes and supernatural powers, but still with a slow art house feeling to it - Sometimes too slow.