Criminal Law (1988)

A defence lawyer (Gary Oldman), the impressive sort who places a glass before a jury and says the decision they have to make is "as clear as water", starts muddying things when he turns against a client he has just got off a murder charge, suddenly believing him to be a crazed killer that needs taking down from within their lawyer-client relationship, and how could he not come to this conclusion given the client (Kevin Bacon) is doing crazy eyes so hard he is cross-eyed (see poster) and has a perfectly plain-to-see serial killer's relationship with his mother, all crude, eyeroll-inducing plot details out of all balance with the movie's attempts at loftiness as the lawyer engages in heady Socratic dialogue about justice with an annoying law muse and at the same time engages in fiery revenge talk with an unlikely love interest.

★☆☆☆☆

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I Am Mother (2019)

A girl (Clara Rugaard-Larsen) raised by a robot in a Human Re-population Facility has her solitary life of dance and psychometric testing interrupted by the arrival from outside the facility of a woman (Hilary Swank) who suggests the girl's robot 'mother' is incapable of feelings for the girl, is lying when it says the air outside the facility is toxic, and is a droid just like the ones outside who have decimated the Earth, in this better than usual Netflix original movie, a scifi thriller that really only errs in how quickly the girl proves willing to question everything she has ever known.

★★★☆☆

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Mother! (2017)

A fleeting shot at the start hints very strongly at Darren Aronofsky's movie's whole but even so the movie goes on to tell its story three times; the first iteration, in which a young homemaker is too polite to ask two unwanted visitors to leave her house, is the most restrained, gleefully sinister and enjoyable, with the subsequent retellings just becoming noisier, more extreme, more crowded, and more unnecessary, not adding much to the parable that has already been determined by that opening moment.

★★★☆☆

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Mother (마더) (2009)

This is another distinctive Bong Joon-ho movie combining family drama, Hitchcockian thrills and twists, and absurdist comedy in a richly detailed story of an ageing mother who during a police investigation into a shocking crime remains determined to protect the interests of her adult son with an intellectual disability.

★★★★☆

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