THE SERVANT

Following his role as the screenwriter for Untold Scandal (2003), KIM Dae-woo became an expert in both period dramas and steamy erotic tales. He’s made films such as Forbidden Quest (2006) and Obsessed (2014), but his most compelling work remains his second fi...

NORTH KOREAN PARTISAN IN SOUTH KOREA

CHUNG Ji-young is an unusual case in Korean cinema, a director who has been able to deliver hits from the 1980s (Mist Cries Like a Woman, 1982) through to the present day (Black Money, 2019). What’s more, most of his famous films have a very political bent, wh...

OKI’S MOVIE

HONG Sang-soo’s 11th film, Oki’s Movie(2010) explores many of the director’s favorite themes and narrative quirks, yet something about this brief 80-minute film has particularly marked his fans, many of whom rank it among his best. The film is split into four ...

TRAFFICKERS

Normally at this time of year, as the summer’s major local releases start to cycle down their runs, we tend to enter an informal thriller season. From late August through to late November, the bulk of the year’s dark and twisted mid-level commercial features m...

I SAW THE DEVIL

In the late 1990s, the Korean film industry experienced a renaissance that quickly saw it conquer its domestic box office and ascend the global stage. While the industry became known for several kinds of films, what marked it out for many viewers overseas were...

TICKET

Prolific director IM Kwon-taek may have started his career in the early 1960s but it was only in the 1980s, after almost two decades of furiously churning out a wide variety of genre films for studios, that he found his feet as filmmaker with a social voice. H...

SUNNY

The sleeper hit of 2011, Sunny opened small in the spring and remained at or near the top of the charts for months, eventually welcoming over seven million viewers - making it the 11th highest grossing Korean film of all time when it was released (it has since...

HAHAHA

For his 10th film, director HONG Sang-soo decamped to Tongyeong, a small, picturesque town on the southern coast of Korea, bringing along with him some of his favorite collaborators, including KIM Sang-kyung, YU Jun-sang and MOON So-ri. Though unmistakably a H...

A MOMENT TO REMEMBER

The early 2000s were the heyday of romantic dramas in Korean cinema and John H. LEE’s A Mo-ment to Remember (2004) surely ranks as one of the genre’s most memorable offerings. It features JUNG Woo-sung and SON Ye-jin in some of their most iconic roles, and off...

VETERAN

Between his Euro action-spy yarn The Berlin File (2013) and his massive-budgeted World War II epic The Battleship Island (2017), director RYOO Seung-wan returned to its jocular action roots for a more modestly-sized production. Yet with its wise-cracking lilt ...