With his latest film, Bong Joon Ho reaches for the stars but what his characters discover in the far reaches of space is just another version of the messed-up world they left behind, a world Bong has laid bare for...
Sometimes a film comes along and blindsides when you least expect it. The sublime surprise Love in the Big City is just such a film, enriching the landscape of Korean cinema in a year that has quietly seen low-key films...
Kim Ho-sun, one of the key directors of 1970s cinema, returned to the spotlight in the early 1990s with the sprawling period romantic epic Death Song, about the torrid affair between Korea's first professional soprano and a playwright during Korea's...
Real estate woes, job security anxiety and social inequality, all neatly packed into a metaphorical dystopia. No doubt about it, The Tenants is definitely a Korean film. Yet by providing a novel twist on its elements and staying true to...
This year's Far East Film Festival is screening a large number of South Korean classics, including a full program dedicated to the country's fascinating 1950s output, such as Park Nam-ok's progressive drama The Widow, the first Korean film ever directed...
One of the final dark closets of modern Korean history gets thrown wide open in Kim Sung-soo's riveting historical drama 12.12: The Day. The film dramatises the coup d'état that took place in the wake of the assassination of President...
If its films and dramas are to be believed, South Korea is a land teeming with vigilantes. They are typically brooding, sharply dressed and very attractive characters with dark pasts who mete out justice with brute strength or elaborate schemes,...
Kim Seong-hun and Ha Jung-woo, the director-actor combo who gave us Tunnel, reunite for the second time on the winning buddy action-comedy Ransomed, the latest in a series of high-profile films based on recent real-life stories featuring Korean characters gallivanting...
Summer Cottages. Summer Dreams. Tian Xiaopeng's animated film has already played in its domestic Chinese market. It is currently touring on the global festival circuit, from Berlin to Tribeca to Neuchâtel, and soon, Fantasia. The international and festival poster is an...
For the past half a dozen years or so, some of the very best debut Korean films have chronicled friendships between young girls. Filled with the fleeting excitement of youth and the complex, mutable feelings that underpin the process of...
Screening in the Busan International Film Festival's signature New Currents competition section, A Wild Roomer, the delightfully droll debut of director Lee Jeong-hong, is a refreshing character study that unfurls around a minor mystery. The film begins much as it...
When you've been deprived of something for an extended period of time, anything that comes close to the real McCoy starts to look a little better than it did before. That may well apply to The Policeman's Lineage, director Lee...
Good things come to those who wait, and so it is with Next Sohee, the blunt and powerful new film from director July Jung, which bowed at the Cannes Film Festival this spring, following eight years after her sensational debut,...
Is the man smoking a cigarette while his ride waits, or is he about to be hit by a moving vehicle? This festival poster, designed by the director of the film, Yoon Seo-jin, for the Busan International Film Festival, captures...
The Busan International Film Festival puts a strong first foot forward this year with its tightly paced and effortlessly entertaining opening film Heaven: To the Land of Happiness, marking a return to form for director Im Sang-soo. Ace Korean cinema...
When a new genre catches on in Korean cinema, it tends to proliferate pretty quickly, but before audiences grow tired of it, filmmakers try to find new ways to freshen things up. Take the disaster film. A perennial favourite at...
Documentary filmmaker Park Hyuck-jee, known for the charming documentary With or Without You, is back with his latest non-fiction work, his first to be invited to Busan. Set in the mountainous Oze region of Central Japan, the pleasurable and satisfying...
After opening the festival in 2018 with Beautiful Days, director Jero Yun returned to Busan this year with his second narrative feature Fighter, which once again focuses on a North Korean defector's difficult experience adjusting in South Korea, and how...
I'll admit I went into Self-Portrait 2020 with a fair amount of trepidation. Here is a nearly three-hour documentary that follows a man who has given up on life, turned to the bottle and now roams the streets of Central...
Released three years, ago, the geopolitical action-thriller Steel Rain was a solid success on the charts but one that was completely overshadowed by two films that hit theaters within a fortnight of its release, Along with the Gods: The Two...
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