Song Kang-ho is superb in this highly-engaging mainstream drama based on the dark history that was the 1980 Gwangju Uprising as a taxi driver unwittingly brings a German reporter to the site.
A Korean adopted by a French couple when she was a baby returns to Korea for the first time as a French woman in Davy Chou’s intimate if chastening third feature, backed by an excellent performance from Park Ji-min in her acting debut.
A more melancholic piece than some of Hong’s breezier offerings as he explores fictive ideals and sad realities through the idea of cinema as a mirror image.
A promising and polished debut feature, this Singapore-Korean co-production has earnestness in abundance even if the storytelling doesn’t quite offer anything markedly revelatory.
An outrageously fun kimchi western for the ages, this is one of the most accomplished action films from South Korea.
Park’s latest Cannes winner charts an alluringly new direction for him—a layered if at times convoluted crime procedural that hides an elusive romantic drama about the perverse relationship between a conflicted investigator and a seductive murder suspect.
It’s more of the same from Kore-eda, but transplanted into a Korean setting, in this heartening mid-tier drama about characters trying to remain human despite not always being on the good side of the law.
Favouring a gritty aesthetic, Park’s ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’ first instalment of his Vengeance trilogy is a brutal and convoluted tragedy of interlocking fates as a child kidnapping goes awry.
Rather underwhelming and at best a minor effort, Hong’s latest explores the nature of being an artist, be it writing, filming or performing, while also functioning as a genteel love letter to his star and muse Kim Min-hee.
One of Hong’s longest films but certainly one of his finest as two friends share over drinks the bittersweet details of their own separate trips to the seaside town of Tongyeong, as the uncertainties of love and conflict control the narrativisation of their memories.
Eternality Tan 