TWO COPS

After seven outings as a director, KANG Woo-suk struck box office glory with his smash hit buddy cop action-comedy Two Cops, which united two of the biggest stars of the day (AHN Sung-ki and PARK Joong-hoon) in what would become the second most successful Kore...

FAREWELL MY DARLING

A year after Three-Oh-One, Three-Oh-Two (1995), arguably his most famous work, director PARK Chul-soo returned to theaters with Farewell My Darling (1996), an altogether different film exploring the impact of modernity on traditional Korean values in a story f...

NO REGRET

Queer themes have steadily but surely become part of the fabric of contemporary Korean cinema, but though there is still a long road ahead, it wasn’t all that long ago that homosexuals characters were virtually absent from the screen in the country. To this da...

WOMAN ON THE BEACH

As he always had and has continued to do until today, director Hong Sangsoo explored many of his favorite themes with his seventh film Woman on the Beach (2006), the story of a director who escapes Seoul to write and becomes entangled between several women who...

HOW TO USE GUYS WITH SECRET TIPS

Playfully lampooning codes of the romantic-comedy genre while also lovingly embracing them, the colorful and vivacious How to Use Guys with Secret Tips (2013) announced the arrival of a new voice in the commercial Korean film realm in the form of Director LEE ...

LOVER’S CONCERTO

Released in the heyday of melodramas, Lover’s Concerto stars three of the genre’s most familiar names in a love triangle featuring all the hallmarks of Korean romantic dramas. The film was the debut of director LEE Han, whose streak of successful dramas, which...

TINKER TICKER

Youth anxiety takes center stage in the Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA) graduation project Tinker Ticker. This debut film by KIM Jung-hoon debuted to little fanfare in the Asian Future section of the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2013, yet, despite n...

MOTHER

Following last night’s premiere of PARASITE, BONG Joon-ho’s latest film, in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival last night, it seems only fitting to use this week’s K-Cinema Library to look back at the last film he made on home soil. A full dec...

ALL ABOUT MY WIFE

On May 17, 2012, a pair of major Korean films opened. One (IM Sang-soo’s The Taste of Money) was the latest work from an auteur which was screening in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the other was a remake of little-known Argentine romantic comedy fro...

SAVE THE GREEN PLANET

2003, considered by many to be the finest year for contemporary Korean cinema, produced an extraordinary array of modern classics that both turned the local filmmaking scene into a profitable industry and introduced Korea as a major player on the international...