Korea

A collection of 40 posts

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Hong Sangsoo

A Traveler's Needs and By the Stream (Hong Sangsoo, 2024)

Ryoo Seungwan

Veteran 2: I, the Executioner (Ryoo Seungwan, 2024)

I couple days ago, I wrote about the upcoming film The Shadow Strays and introduced it by hyping up all the incredible action movies we’ve seen coming from around the world over the last several years. It was by no means meant to be an exhaustive list, but in

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Jason Yu

Sleep (Jason Yu, 2023)

Heo Myeong-haeng

The Roundup: Punishment (Heo Myeong-haeng, 2024)

The man with the cinder block fists is back, and this time he’s learning what the internet is. For the last three years, Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee) has been making sequels to his hit 2017 film The Outlaws, in which he plays a large cop working his way

Strange Tales

2023 Fall Festival Compilation

As I put together in 2022 and again for last Spring, here is a collection of the reviews I wrote for InReview Online's coverage of various film festivals from around the world. For publication here, the reviews have been re-edited and occasionally expanded. Check out the rest of

Strange Tales

2023 Spring Festival Compilation

As I put together last year, here is a collection of the reviews I wrote for InReview Online's coverage of various film festivals from around the world so far this year. Check out the rest of the festival coverage at the site, they've got a lot

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Hong Sangsoo

In Water (Hong Sangsoo, 2023)

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Hong Sangsoo

Walk Up (Hong Sangsoo, 2022)

Devils on the Doorstep

Jeong Ga-young Capsule Reviews

Capsule Reviews: Hit the Night (2017) – June 29, 2018 Hit the Night is an ultra-low budget comedy about a director who has an idea for a movie she wants to make. As research, she interviews a slightly older man about love, sex, and relationships (not necessarily in that order). Slowly

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Hong Sangsoo

The Novelist's Film (Hong Sangsoo, 2022)

Choi Jaehoon

The Killer (Choi Jaehoon, 2022)

Last night I picked up and started reading the first Jack Reacher book. I saw the first Tom Cruise movie years ago, and liked it well enough, and really enjoyed the Amazon series that premiered on Amazon earlier this year. My edition of the book includes an introduction by author

Hong Sangsoo

In Front of Your Face (Hong Sangsoo, 2021)

Hong Sangsoo’s latest feature, his second this year, is his first film not to feature actress Kim Minhee since 2016’s Yourself and Yours. Kim instead serves as Production Manager, and her sensibility seems to pervade the film, even if we can’t see her at work. Or rather,

Hong Sangsoo

Hotel by the River (Hong Sangsoo, 2018)

Sean Gilman: You and I both saw Hotel by the River not long after it premiered late last summer at the Locarno Film Festival. But while in recent years we’ve found it difficult to stop talking and writing about Hong Sangsoo, as far as I know, neither of us

Hong Sangsoo

List (Hong Sangsoo, 2011)

With a few days to spare after wrapping the production of In Another Country, Hong Sangsoo and some of his crew and actors hung around and made this short film, which he’d agreed to do as part of the funding for the feature. Being Hong Sangsoo, of course he

Hong Sangsoo

Grass (Hong Sangsoo, 2018)

Evan Morgan: Let’s start with the title. Hong arguably crafts the best titles of any filmmaker working today; something like On the Beach at Night Alone is tinged with mystery, poetical and allusive. Grass, on the other hand, sounds quite atypical: earthy, prosaic, direct. Critical writing on Hong often

Kim Jeewoon

Kim Jeewoon Capsule Reviews

A Bittersweet Life (2005) — March 15, 2017 Kind of like Miller’s Crossing, but without all the plot, dialogue, or character. It’s a vehicle for surface-level emotions (love, pain, revenge), but Kim has great eye for cool and set-piece construction. He tends toward the gimmicky, the kind of camera

Devils on the Doorstep

Bong Joonho Capsule Reviews

Memories of Murder (2003) — September 13, 2019 It always seems like Bong’s movies, while they’re good and I like them, are never really quite as good as they probably should be. Like how Mother is just a worse version of Poetry, or Shin Godzilla is a much better

Hong Sangsoo

The Day After (Hong Sangsoo, 2017)

“I think that I have no control over my destiny and that I don’t play the leading role in it. I think that I can die at any time, I am ready to accept it. I think everything is less serious than it seems. In fact, I think that

Hong Sangsoo

Hahaha (Hong Sangsoo, 2010)

Among the slightest of Hong Sangsoo’s films is this story about two men recalling their recent trips to a small town. The movie is narrated by each in turn, we see them in black and white still photos as they drink toasts between anecdotes. The twist is that they

Hong Sangsoo

Our Sunhi (Hong Sangsoo, 2013)

The culmination of the Jung Yumi films, in which a young film student unsuccessfully navigates the attentions of several competing men, none of whom see her for who she actually is, blinded by their perceptions of her prettiness, her innocence, her artistic sense, and so on. This cycle began with

Hong Sangsoo

Like You Know It All (Hong Sangsoo, 2009)

“Why don’t you admit you don’t know it all? It’s hard to get someone’s heart, right?” This was the first Hong Sangsoo movie I ever saw, at the Vancouver Film Festival in 2009, which is pretty much the ideal setting for a Hong movie about life

Hong Sangsoo

The Day He Arrives (Hong Sangsoo, 2011)

“Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.” For some reason, this final line from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket was stuck in my head while rewatching The Day He Arrives. There’s no apparent relation between the two, though I have been thinking

Hong Sangsoo

Night and Day (Hong Sangsoo, 2008)

The Hongian hero, not so young anymore, finds himself alone in Paris. A quick intertitle informs us that this man, Seongnam (played by Kim Youngho), was at a party with some exchange students where marijuana was being consumed. Someone ratted him out to the police (pot smoking being apparently a

Hong Sangsoo

Woman on the Beach (Hong Sangsoo, 2006)

Coming off of one of his more audacious experiments in repetition, Tale of Cinema, in which the first half of the movie turns out to be a movie the main characters of the second half are watching, Woman on the Beach feels like a step toward conventionality. The two-part form

Hong Sangsoo

Woman is the Future of Man (Hong Sangsoo, 2004)

After finding increasing warmth amidst narrative experimentation and a shearing away of formal adornment, with his fifth film Hong Sangsoo returns to the cruel satire of his debut. A bitter and cruel skewering of the pretensions, hypocrisies and stupid lusts of the modern man, the film is relentlessly bleak, offering