Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Mother (Korea 2009, 128 min. dir: Joon-ho Bong, cast: Hye-ja Kim, Bin Won).

I’m never sure if director Joon-ho Bong is a comedy director. Mother is a serious murder mystery where a mother tries to clear her son. But it is so funny that you can’t help wondering if the world-weary mother and her dullard son aren’t really playing dead pan humor.

He’s accused of killing a girl, but mother won’t give up on him, no matter that it costs her everything else in her life.The strength of the movie is Hye-ja Kim as the mother. She’s an actress whose face is lined with suffering and whose eyes are set in resolve.

Who couldn’t love or hate a mother like this? There is really nothing between those two poles. The story and characters are all delicious, even if the plot meanders like the stream on the golf course where Bin Won found the golf club driver that is the crucial piece of police evidence. Even minor characters are delicious; like a police detective who watches phone videos or his female evidence clerk who asks whether they really need to send the golf club to forensics because anyone can see the red stuff is not blood, but lipstick.

These are the touches that make Mother delightful. The same attention to detail and offbeat characters can be seen in Joon-ho Bong’s earlier horror movie, The Host. That one also deals with water but not on a golf course. The Host is about a monster that comes out of the river to terrorize a city. Humor and terror, the meal is best as a mix of both dishes.

Entre Nos (USA 2009, 80 min, dir: Gloria La Morte with Paola Mendoza, cast: Paola Mendoza, Sebastian Villada, Laura Montana.

If you are Latin, the proving ground for human strength is not Colombia or Mexico, it is Queens. At least according to several recent films set in the borough. Entre Nos joins Paraiso Travel and Where God Left his Shoes (both on Movie With Me) as a gritty emotional movie about tough life and tough love on the streets off Roosevelt Avenue.

Laura Montana (as Mariana) stars in her own story, which she dedicates to her mother. Her husband leaves at the beginning of the movie and she is penniless with two children. The downward progression to homelessness doesn’t take very long and the family is reduced to collecting cans from garbage to sell for food.

Montana’s own story is not so different. Her Colombian mother brought her up on the streets of LA until she became a teenage gang member.Then she was shipped back to Colombia to live with an aunt. It was there, she says, that she learned that life was more than survival. She came back to LA and went to UCLA film school. That led to a part in a student movie that led to a major role in Sangre de mi Sangre (2007). That film is set in Brooklyn.

Entre Nos is remarkable that it got made at all. Small films like this are only possible because of filmmakers who burn to tell human stories. Laura Montana says in a YouTube Interview that her film is about survival and coming of age: first for the woman she plays, then for her son (Sebastian Villada). “We’re told time and again stories of white males, but we’re not told stories of complex people of color…and I thought instead of complaining about it I was going to do something about it and I started writing.”

The result is effecting, personal, and original.

The Runaways (USA 2010, 106 min, dir: Floria Sigismondi, cast: Dakota Fanning, Kristen Stewart, Scout Taylor-Compton, Michael Shannon).

When the great history of rock is written it will be a two volume boxed set with the history of sex. The two are both inspired by the same primitive African rhythms. Louisiana Cajun settlers banned blacks from dancing to a song they called Les Haricots because the beat was too suggestive of fucking. A century later the phrase “les haricots” was corrupted and shortened to “zericots” and then “zydeco.”  And with that name an early form of rock and roll evolved.

What better film subject than an all girl band struggling with music, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, lesbian love and growing up poor in the San Fernando Valley. You can’t make a bad movie of this even though Floria Sigimondi’s style seems oddly detached from the emotionalism crying to be seen.

Even though Joan Jett prints her own Sex Pistols tee shirt, there is no nudity, penetration, and damn little masturbation in The Runaways. Too bad, it could have been a musical debauch.

Despite this lack, the story of an all girl band making it in the 70′s is always interesting. And the rise from trailer trash to primo stash is fascinating. Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) is brooding, pensive and bound for stardom far beyond anyone’s dreams. Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) is brilliant at being doomed.

The one guy who makes a difference in this movie is Kim (Michael Shannon) the manager who will steal for you and steal from you. But without him the Runaways would never have made it; or at least that is what the film suggests.

The best thing director Sigimondi does is let them play the music (her directing background is music videos). When the band jams, the power of their sound makes up for a lot of script shortcomings and pushes a sound that made them stars.