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"Face" is a detective story/murder mystery with supernatural elements and a few of the images used in recent Japanese and Korean horror movies. The protagonist works with the police reconstruction the appearance of murder victims from fragmentary skeletal remains including a few recently that have had all the soft tissue burned away with acid.

His daughter is recovering very slowly from a heart transplant and we see (but the characters don't) that some of the hearts available for transplant into patients with complications may have been harvested by other than ethical means

We saw "The Host" (South Korea) today and it is hard to write about it without sounding like a flack for Magnolia Pictures. KO A-sung, a fifteen year old actress who plays a middle school student grabbed by the title monster gives a starmaking performance if ever there was one. BAE Doo-na is a very beautiful and expressive actress—her eyes are almost a special effect in themselves, as startling as the eyes of Emmanuelle Beart or Bette Davis—and she is terrific here. She is heartbreakingly good in everything I have seen her in. SONG Kang-ho is a real movie star. This is the fifth film we have seen him in—he simply disappears into his character like very few stars can.

Its score may be the best part of "The Host" and I hope it is available as a CD. Cinematography, editing and all other tech credits were outstanding. Director BONG Joon-ho said in an interview that he couldn't do as many monster shots as he wanted due to budget restraints—even so the monster was properly scary and repellent.

But it isn't really a monster movie as such. The evils are bureaucracy (both Korean and American), petty tyrants (ditto), the horror of being a client state occupied by the armed forces of another country, the frightening combination of military power and stupidity shown by the United States are worse than the monster. It is also about the indelible ties of family and culture, the unbreakable bonds between parents and children, the ability of otherwise undistinguished people to become heroes in the face of evil and the nobility of striving to overcome a crippling affliction.

It is worth seeing in a movie theater—the sound effects and score are what digital sound was made for.

A really good movie

While this movie is a number of things--a standalone Hong Kong cops and robbers flick, a parody of or comment upon or theft from the "Die Hard" moves" it is also, more than anything else, director Wong Jing's vehicle to run over Jackie Chan. They worked together on "City Cop" and grew to loathe each other. Based on what we know of the work habits of both, they probably both had good reason to dislike the other.

Wong Jing is very powerful in Hong Kong movies. The IMDb filmography only hints at how prolific he has been--there have been some years in which he wrote, produced, executive produced, directed or consulted upon over 20 films.Ridiculing Jackie Chan may not have been number one on his list of things to do but he did get around to it. This is the happy result.