Fans of Korean cinema had very high hopes for Stoker, Park Chan-Wook’s English language debut. Thanks to his reputation on the international film festival circuit, in particular with his cult Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance), Park had seeming first choice of talent and assembled a stellar cast in Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode and Nicole Kidman. (Interestingly, none of the three principals is an American.)

True to form for Park, Stoker is both visually stunning and psychologically and physically brutal. The cinematography is painterly and the framing sculptural. Every frame merits notice and every still a work of art. In fact it’s safe to say that Stoker is Park’s most strictly art-produced film. Every color and detail bears evidence of obsessive attention, from the color of characters’ hair to the color of the walls, from the stitching on a collar to the scuffing on a shoe.

In large part this magnification of detail effectively reflects the psychological and somatic experience of India Stoker (Wasikowska), whose hypersensitive observations of the world make ordinary life an ordeal for her. On the day India turns eighteen her father Richard dies in a horrific accident. We see her first at his funeral. Relations between her parents have evidently been strained for some time. Her mother, Evelyn Stoker, seems hardly bereaved, nor does she attempt to comfort her shattered daughter.

Stoker is a film at odds with itself. On paper, it’s a slick piece of neo-gothic thrills, parading its Jane-Eyre/Mysteries of Udolpho (and more) influences, with red rooms, sinister-seeming relatives, fogged-out basements, and driblets of blood.

More plot-fully speaking, you have the mysterious death of a loved one, in this case the father Richard Stoker (Dermot Mulroney), who leaves his immense estate to his wife Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) and daughter India (Mia Wasikowska). Soon after, Richard’s estranged brother Charlie (Matthew Goode) shows up, taking a break from one of his frequent trips around the world. Charlie tries to reconnect with his brother’s family, seeming to seduce Evelyn but eliciting only hesitation and curious dread from India.

All three play their roles well, with Kidman wandering through her lines as in a daze, transfixed by the appearance of a younger, sleeker version of her husband. Mia is exactly the opposite, dissociated from everything and body. But the clear standout is Goode, who finally has found a role that utterly suits him — however specialized it may be. Kind and pleasant with a chilling, menacing undertone, you’re just waiting for him to explode.

If director Park Chan-Wook never did another movie besides Oldboy, he would still be regarded as a masterful filmmaker. Oldboy is just that good.

Fortunately, he isn’t resting on the laurels of that excellent movie. He’s doing more. In fact, he’s about to make his English language debut.

For this, a film called Stoker, he’s got Mia Wasikowska, Dermot Mulroney and Nicole Kidman to work with. The story, as we know it so far, is as follows:

After India’s father dies, her Uncle Charlie, who she never knew existed, comes to live with her and her unstable mother. She comes to suspect this mysterious, charming man has ulterior motives and becomes increasingly infatuated with him.

Sounds cool. Let’s just hope nothing happens to anyone’s tounge in this one. We’re not sure we could go through that again.

Check out the trailer for Stoker after the break.

The casting has not come particularly quick or easy for the Spike Lee directed remake of the Korean thriller Oldboy.

Josh Brolin (No Country For Old Men, Men In Black III) locked in as the lead character quite early in the process but the quest for a villain so far has involved names ranging from Christian Bale to  Clive Owen, with even Colin Firth being in the mix. All have passed for various reasons and the search continues.

Filling the role of Brolin’s love interest, Marie, has been an equally difficult task. Both Rooney Mara and Mia Wasikowska have been offered and rejected the part of the female lead role. It is now being reported that the role of Marie has been offered to Elizabeth Olsen.

The film follows an average man who is kidnapped and imprisoned in a shabby cell for 15 years without explanation. He then is released, equipped with money, a cellphone and expensive clothes. As he strives to explain his imprisonment and get his revenge, he soon finds out that his kidnapper has a greater plan for him and is set onto a path of pain and suffering in an attempt to uncover the motive of his mysterious tormentor.

The lesser known Olsen sister, Elizabeth seemingly sprang out of nowhere at Sundance 2011 to become one of America’s most sought after young actresses thanks to parts in the soon to be released Silent House and the under the radar film Martha Marcy May Marlene. With three other projects listed to start in 2013, she’s not going away anytime soon. She’s also got a sizable gap in her schedule before those projects are due to start, which makes this a very plausible option.

The Kids Are All Right opens with shots of 18-year-old Joni (a wonderful Mia Wasikowska) playing scrabble with friends and 15-year-old Laser (Josh Hutcherson) sniffing a crushed Sudafed with his skateboarding buddy Clay, all to Vampire Weekend’s “Cousins.” Joni and Laser are gorgeous, smart and nice. Despite the minor drug use and usual teenager angsts, they are, for the most part, very much all right.

But this movie is really about their parents—their mother Nic, a perfectionist, workaholic OB-Gyn (played by Annette Bening, who has made a career specialty out of wound-tight women), and their other mother, easy-going, nurturing earth girl Jules (a very fine Julianne Moore), who has maybe let her life slide past her. A long-married couple, Nic and Jules have, as parents do, put their kids first for so long that they have lost touch with themselves and each other.

And yet they remain very self-aware and caring people. When they question Clay’s rightness as a friend, it comes couched in a language of earnest self-actualization and higher consciousness that is both insightful and ridiculous: “It’s just that he seems… untended.” And “Is he the kind of friend who will help you grow?”

Untended Joni and Laser certainly are not. Nic and Jules are extremely conscientious parents, and a great deal of the humor in the early part of this film comes from the overmothering Joni and Laser endure. Nevertheless, Laser feels the lack of a male role model and it is at his urging that Joni, having recently turned eighteen, the age at which she can legally request contact, learns the identity of their sperm donor and gets in touch with him.

The sperm donor is Paul, played by the miraculous Mark Ruffalo, who can shade a dozen layers of feeling and thought into a single moment. I’ve sometimes found that his extraordinary openness can come off as ambivalence, but his characterization of Paul is founded on a bedrock of emotion. Paul is not only open to contact with Joni and Laser, he welcomes it.

Even when he tackles darker subject matter, Tim Burton always manages to bring a touch of whimsy to his films.  On the surface, Alice in Wonderland seems to be the perfect tale for the eccentric filmmaker to put his own spin on. With Alice oscillating wildly between giant and diminutive proportions, two queens vying for control of the land, and anthropomorphic fauna and animals, the tale seems ripe for a wild re-imagining.

Trouble is, Burton leaves the enchantment at home along with warmth and heart. The resulting movie is rather cold, devoid of color and brightness (save for the mad hatter’s shock of orange hair and startling green eyes) and not a lot of fun. I’m not saying that makes it bad, but it was very different from what I was expecting.

In this particular retelling, Alice is a grown woman instead of a little girl. At a large party she learns she is to marry a stodgy bore of a man. She rushes off to be by herself and falls down the rabbit hole into the “underworld.”  There she encounters the characters that we are all familiar with. There is the white rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the stoned-out-of-his-cocoon caterpillar (Alan Rickman), and of course, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp.)

This version of the  Mad Hatter is a more tragic character with a brutal back story to explain his madness.  I found Depp’s portrayal of the Hatter annoying and frenetic, crazy for the sake of being crazy. He drifts in and out of a heavy Scottish brogue for reasons not immediately clear.  I wish the character had been toned down a bit as I think it would have made him a little more likable.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is certainly turning heads with every new image and trailer that the film has to offer. Mostly because of how outrageous Burton’s style seems to be with this timeless classic, and of course his continued success when partnering up with Johnny Depp.

Fans of both Depp and Burton will get an eyeful in this new clip that’s been released for the film. In it, we get a glimpse at Depp, while he talks about Burton’s take on the classic. Also, some great shots of Twiddle-Dee and Twiddle-Dum, as well as the Cheshire Cat and even Crispin Glover as The Knave of Hearts.

The film also stars Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hatheway, Alan Rickman, Kingdom’s Stephen Fry, Christopher Lee, and Mia Wasikowska as the titular Alice.

Check out the clip after the jump, and be sure to see much more from Burton’s wild new world as time draws closer to the March 5th release date. There are also rumors that Disney is buying time during next Sunday’s Super Bowl for an extended trailer, so be sure to get your DVR’s ready!

Sure, all the news and focus of the internet, right now, is on the new Iron Man 2 trailer which, in my opinion deserves the amount of excitement that it’s inspired. But, that’s not what we’re talking about now. The new trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, is online and gives us a pretty thorough, and spectacular glimpse into Burton’s creation of Wonderland.

We see the White Rabbit, the Red Queen and her main man, The Knave of Hearts, and yes, the Mad Hatter. It looks fantastical, and certainly Burton inspired, if still in that candy-coated look that he’s had on previous film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The film’s synopsis reads as, “19 year-old Alice, returns to the whimsical world she first encountered as a young girl, embarks on a fantastical journey to find her true destiny and end the Red Queen’s reign of terror.” And the trailer gives us glimpses of the Jabberwock, the Mad Hatter’s companions the Dormouse and the March Hare; as well as the Cheshire Cat, and Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

The film features Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Fry, Alan Rickman, and Mia Wasikowska as Alice, along with a multitude of others. It’s scheduled for release March 10, 2010, in 3-D and IMAX.

There is lots to be said about what we’ve seen from Tim Burton’s upcoming reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, and most of it is about Johnny Depp’s performance as the Mad Hatter. While that will be a definite selling point for the film, there are still many things that it has to offer, such as the distribution in Disney 3D and IMAX 3D.

The rest of the cast fills out quite nicely, with Anne Hatheway, Helena Bonham Carter (Burton’s wife), Crispin Glover, and Mia Wasikowska joining the cast. Expect this to be about as twisted as the way Lewis Carroll originally imagined it.

The film hits theaters in 3D and IMAX on March 5th, 2010, but you can check out the brand new poster that has hit the web, along with an invitation to join The Disloyal Subjects of the Mad Hatter on Facebook. From there, you can become a fan to get major updates on the film and goodies for you to download.

Otherwise, keep it here as we bring you new stuff on Alice In Wonderland in the future, and check out the first full poster for the film after the jump.

It seems rather fitting that the Mad Hatter would show up unannounced in the middle of the Alice in Wonderland panel, especially when said hatter is Johnny Depp. MTV has reported that Johnny Depp surprised fans at the Disney 3-D panel at San Diego Comic-Con by showing up at the end of Tim Burton’s presentation of footage from the film.

The addition of Depp to the stage was a memorable end to the panel discussion, which began with filmmaker Tim Burton getting cheers from the crowd. The presentation included a teaser trailer of various footage from the film in 3-D, with Burton laughing about all the wacky characters included in his version of Alice in Wonderland.

“Looks like a freak show, doesn’t it?” the director laughed while the character images graced the screen.

Burton said the Alice in Wonderland film isn’t a faithful adaptation of the classic book by Lewis Carroll, but instead takes the characters and various scenes from the book and molds them into an updated story.

Alice in Wonderland stars Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Alan Rickman and Mia Wasikowska and is scheduled for a March 5, 2010 release. Our coverage of Alice in Wonderland continues tomorrow right here at The Flickcast.