| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 17, 2011

As ebullient and bizarre as a monster that can do back flips, leaving the viewer in a shock of delight.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 1, 2007

A horror thriller, a political satire, a dysfunctional family comedy, and a touching melodrama, Bong Joon-ho's The Host is also one helluva monster movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 1, 2007

Comes up with not only a fistful of nervous pools of fear but also a heady wellspring of classic monster-movie matinee fun.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 31, 2007

Bravely shifting tones from the horrific to the slapstick and back again, Bong Joon-ho has made a movie that's comprised almost equally of family sitcom, political indictment, high-urban paranoia and maximum-geek, monster-movie delight.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 30, 2007

Maybe this is actually a treatise on the dissonance between East and West, science and nature, promise and tragedy. Nah. It's just a dumb, crappy horror movie that wants to be celebrated as such.

| Original Score: D | Mar 23, 2007

The film's limber and inventive director Joon-ho Bong keeps The Host creeping and leaping for its entire two hours, which are filled with incident after incident, alternately terrifying, ridiculous, suspenseful and wry.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 23, 2007

Barely five minutes into The Host, it's already clear that a classic movie monster has been superbly unleashed. Its introductory rampage on the banks of the Han River instantly qualifies as one of the best monster attack scenes ever.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 16, 2007

Individual stories bog down the film's pace, but The Host recovers quickly to redefine horror for the new millennium. This you have to see.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 16, 2007

The movie pops up out of nowhere, grabs you in its big, messy tentacles, and drags you down into murky depths, where social satire coexists with slapstick, and B-movie clichés mutate into complex metaphors.

| Mar 15, 2007

It's unlike just about any other monster movie I've ever seen.

Full Review | Mar 12, 2007

A perfect mixture of the silly and the grave.

| Mar 12, 2007

Bong still offers a powerful rejoinder to his Hollywood counterparts: Anything you can do, I can do better.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Mar 10, 2007

You'll laugh, you'll gasp, you'll jump, you'll ask Hollywood for your money back. Seek it out.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 10, 2007

If this madly entertaining movie has a fault, it's that it's too ingenious for the genre it ostensibly inhabits.

| Mar 9, 2007

What a pleasure to watch an ambitious horror film that not only frightens but also surprises and engages us completely with its artful shifting of tones.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 9, 2007

A great piece of filmmaking and a legitimate science-fiction/horror classic.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 9, 2007

The Host is a loopy, feverishly imaginative genre hybrid about the demons that haunt us from without and within.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 9, 2007

The Host is a horror movie with a difference. South Korea's biggest box-office hit ever, the thriller -- by director-writer Bong Joon-ho -- is a fantastical genre-buster.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 9, 2007

Bong Joon-ho's cheerfully outrageous monster movie is set to attain instant cult status.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 9, 2007