The problem with with The Handmaiden is that it starts out perfect. Just perfect, I mean, everything I want a movie to be is in there: utterly lush, can’t-stand-it-how-pretty costumes and production design that bring pre-WWII Korea to life with elegance and great vividness while also locking the film into a visual schema based on […]
There’s no inherent reason to compare a Korean horror film and an Australian feminist parable, but throughout the entirety of 2006’s Cinderella, from director Bong Man-dae and screenwriter Son Kwang-soo, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty from 2011 (whether I’d have made the same connections if I’d seen the films […]
A review requested by Andrew Milne, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Throughout his career, director Kim Jee-woon has been an unapologetic generic magpie, unified only in that whether he’s making a psycho-thriller like A Tale of Two Sisters, an absurdist Western like The Good, the Bad, the […]
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 […]
Ever since it won the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, Kim Ki-duk’s Pieta has divided its audiences into “fucking brilliant!” or “fucking garbage!” camps just as harshly and brutally as its protagonist acts when he beats delinquent debtors into crippledom. And we now understand, at least in the abstract, where that sharp […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/15World premiere: 10 November, 2010, South Korea There are a lot of storylines that you’d expect from a movie called Haunters before arriving at the one it actually possesses: a man who can turn other people into his puppets just by staring at them squares off against the only person […]
There’s a temptation to over-praise I Saw the Devil on the grounds of sheer novelty: it takes a basket of ripe clichés and mixes them into something that you simply do not ever see in American cinema, however much each ingredient is individually over-worked to the point of moral indecency. 1) Serial killer 2) who […]
Watching Lee-Chang Dong’s Poetry, I was reminded quite irresistibly of Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother, and not only – at least I hope not – because both are South Korean films about matriarchs forced into terrible ethical decisions to safeguard the future of their young male heir. Though God knows, films have been compared on weaker grounds. […]
The title of Kim Ki-Duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring pretty much says it all: here is a story of time passing, marked by five particular moments. No points for guessing that the seasons of the title are metaphorical references for points in a man’s life, but yes, this is the story of a […]
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 […]
You’ve got to at least give writer-director Yoo Ha credit that A Frozen Flower is a rather unconventional movie: a lush period epic whose drama springs from homosexuality and a most bizarre kind of adultery isn’t necessarily the kind of thing you expect to see around every corner; although it is a South Korean film, […]
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 […]
