Illang: The Wolf Brigade (South Korea, 2018)
I’m a big fan of Kim Jee-woon. With the exception of his 2016 period piece, The Age of Shadows, I have seen and admired all...
The Witness (South Korea, 2018) [SDAFF 2018]
Near the end of Cho Kyu-jang’s film about a witnessed murder and the raw challenge of owning up to one’s witnessing is perhaps the most...
Say Yes (South Korea, 2001)
Kim Sung-Hong has recently directed such middling shock-horror fare as the serial killer thriller Missing (2009), and the surgery-centered horror Doctor (2012). However, in 2001, he...
Mother (South Korea, 2009)
Bong Joon-ho’s sombre follow-up to the frenetic and adrenaline-filled The Host (2006) deals with some stark subject matter. However, there are some admirable streaks of...
The Admiral: Roaring Currents (South Korea, 2014)
It seems like New Korean Cinema came full circle this summer. Just as Shiri (1999) sank James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), so has The Admiral: Roaring Currents...
A Hard Day (South Korea, 2014)
A hard day leads to an increasingly rough week in this blistering crime thriller from writer-director Kim Seong-hun, who infuses his taut neo-noir plotting with...
Commitment (South Korea, 2013) [Terracotta 2014]
In 2009, after his father, a North Korean spy, is thwarted from returning from his mission in the South, eighteen year old LI Myung-hoon (Choi...
YAK Films, Hip Hop, And Public Space in South Korea
When I finally went to South Korea in 2005 to attend the Pusan International Film Festival, (when the festival still spelled the city with a...
Villain and Widow (South Korea, 2010)
Once again I’ve come head to head with a genre-bending Korean film and as usual I feel it necessary to comment on this fact. Villain...
A Dirty Carnival (South Korea, 2006)
Although most South Korean gangster pictures deliver the moral message that crime does not pay, this maxim does not apply at the domestic box office...