'Hard Candy' Indeed: A Dark Thriller

NPR | By Bob Mondello

Published April 14, 2006 at 2:00 PM MDT

Bob Mondello reviews Hard Candy, a thriller that wraps issues of pedophilia, torture, and vengeance into a slick -- but sick -- little package.

The movie begins with a scenario that may seem familiar to anyone who's read newspapers in the past five years: A girl meets up with a strange adult from an Internet chat room. But Bob Mondello says the film ends up somewhere surprising.

Bob Mondello

Bob Mondello, who jokes that he was a jinx at the beginning of his critical career — hired to write for every small paper that ever folded in Washington, just as it was about to collapse — saw that jinx broken in 1984 when he came to NPR.

See stories by Bob Mondello