A review requested by Kevin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. An older review of this film can be found here. It’s clear right from the title of 2008’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird (which I believe to be a direct translation from the Korean) that the film intends […]
The game I enjoy playing so much, “what happens when Major International Film Auteur X moves outside of their native country and native language for the first time?” has been given a particularly unexpected pair of answers by Kore-eda Hirokazu, the Japanese creator of so many feather-soft stories of people on the edge of the […]
Generally speaking, I prefer to watch films with as little foreknowledge as possible. Don’t seek out trailers, don’t browse movie-news sites; if I’m reading someone else’s review, it’s because I’ve either seen the movie or have pretty firmly decided that I’d rather not. There are many advantages to this approach—the joy of discovery chief among […]
Park Chan-wook received the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and though I’ve only seen, at this writing, five of the 21 features that screened in Competition, it’s hard to imagine that Vincent Lindon’s jury (which included Asghar Farhadi, Rebecca Hall, Joachim Trier, and Jeff Nichols, among others) didn’t make the correct […]
One of the goofier box-office sensations of the ’70s saw Airport, Universal Pictures’ soapy adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s best-selling novel, unexpectedly kick off a decade-long franchise (and usher in a general vogue for big-budget disaster movies featuring all-star casts; The Towering Inferno, like Airport, was even Oscar-nominated for Best Picture). As often happens with sequels, […]
Even for ardent fans like myself, it can be a challenge to remember which Hong Sang-soo movie is which. The hardest-working man in South Korean show business has written and directed 27 features over the past 26 years, creating an oeuvre that rivals those of Rohmer and Ozu for stubborn variations-on-a-theme consistency. To be fair, […]
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 […]
Lee Chang-dong is by no means the most prolific of the many great South Korean directors to come to major prominence in the 21st Century: Burning, his sixth feature, comes to us after a long eight-year gap since his fifth, 2010’s lovely Poetry. But he does maybe put up a real fight to be considered […]
If there is one great huge problem with Forgotten, and I rather feel like “problem” is a bit of a leading word, it’s that the film is nakedly, overwhelmingly anxious to remind you of Oldboy. And surely, Oldboy is a wonderful movie, so that’s an understandable impulse, but we’re still stuck with a film that, […]
Depending on what you’re watching for, on a scene-by-scene basis The Villainess might be anything from a contender for 2017’s most powerfully image-driven film to a frustrating, confusing an alienating affair of watching non-characters maneuver through a non-plot while gushing jets of blood. And why I say “scene-by-scene basis”, I really almost mean a “shot-by-shot […]
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 […]
I shall simply cut to the chase: The Wailing is all that I could possibly ask of a horror movie. The Korean import isn’t perfect, of course, particularly with an ending that goes through at least one too many switchbacks (though the concluding pair of scenes are exquisite), and a distinct over-reliance on “scary dream […]
