The Yellow Sea (2010, R)

This South Korean film is about a Chinese taxi driver named Gu-nam in Yanji City, the crime-ridden region between North Korea, China and Russia. He owes money to the criminals that obtained his wife's visa to work in South Korea (which the characters simply refer to as "Korea"). He hasn't heard from her in a while nor received any money from her, so he assumes she's cheating on him and/or prostituting herself. Kind of like Lucky Number Slevin (though far less humorous), he's offered a job to kill a man in Korea to wipe his debt and he can look for his wife in the meantime. Things don’t go as planned and he has to improvise.

7 Days (2010, R)

This French film is about a man whose 8-year-old daughter goes missing on the way to school and is found later in the worst way.  He abducts the man who committed the crime (en route to jail/courthouse; it's pretty certain he did it though he has not been tried or sentenced yet) and decides to torture him to death over the course of (you guessed it) seven days and then turn himself in to the authorities.  Meanwhile the ranking police officer who worked the case of the man's daughter is trying to find him, as much or more so to save the father as the original perpetrator.

I was bracing myself for this movie to be "torture porn", a sub-category of movies that have amped-up gruesomeness and just enough plot to keep it going, but was happy that this time it would be cathartic in that the victim of the torture would be a horrible horrible person rather than an innocent abductee.  I was pleasantly surprised that the movie had a lot more depth and complexity than that.

Paranorman (2012, PG)

This is a stop-motion animation movie about an 11-year old boy named Norman who can see and talk to ghosts and whose town has a little-believed curse from a centuries-dead witch.  His family doesn't understand him, his classmates at school either don't want to associate with him or they downright bully him, and the various ghosts in town are generally really nice and like him a lot. 

The visual style is the first noteworthy aspect of the film.  I like that they animated the film with stop-motion techniques rather than the computer graphics which are so popular in animation these days.  I honestly don't know which is less expensive to employ, but I know stop-motion has to be very tedious to record, and I find it brings a certain charm to the film... maybe it just reminds me of the Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer movie I used to watch when I was young, though the animation in Paranorman is more elaborate and smooth (looks less like wood).  The color pallet is pretty dark with reddish-browns and eerie greens which you don't see too often in animation outside of Invader Zim.  There are no parallel lines or right angles in this film which adds to a cartoony quality but also the feel of unease.