Bong Joon-ho has been a brand-name director among cinephiles since 2006’s monster movie-cum-domestic drama The Host, and South Korean cinema’s ongoing golden age has been around for even longer, at least as far back as 2002’s Oasis, directed by Lee Chang-dong. So there’s not really any sense in which Bong’s seventh feature, Parasite, is particularly […]

Whatever else is true of Bong Joon-ho’s filmography as late, I’m glad that we have one filmmaker in the business of treating global capitalism as cartoonishly evil in madcap genre films that have the approximate rationality of 1960s European comic books. Okja, Bong’s latest film isn’t as visually brazen & thus not as successful as […]

Snowpiercer is the absolute best thing. Okay, so Snowpiercer isn’t literally the absolute best, obviously, but it’s the kind of film which exists on a plain of such energy and madness that it inspires such an all-in response even if it’s stupid. Incidentally, the last movie I saw that made me feel the same “that’s […]

Bong Joon-Ho’s third feature, the amazing giant monster movie/intimate family drama The Host instantly shot him to the very top of the list of “South Korean Directors To Look Out For” – a list that has become altogether crowded in the last decade, making Bong’s immediate fame that much more impressive. Three years later, and […]

Tokyo! is another one of those new versions of old-fashioned anthology films that exists for no reason other than to show of a handful of short films connected by only the loosest commonality: in this case, three segments about Tokyo, although the precise definition of “about” is different for each director involved. First up is […]

Ever since it premiered at Cannes in 2006, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host has been the recipient of some truly glowing festival praise: “the best monster movie in decades” is not at all an uncommon sentiment. That’s over-selling it something fierce (and probably reflects the fact that Proper Critics don’t really see all that many monster […]