CONFESSION

Not every film gets the release it deserves and sometimes strong reviews and festival invitations aren’t enough to really put something on people’s radar. LEE Do-yun’s impressive debut film Con-fession is such a case. Three young actors pour themselves into a ...

THE THIEVES

After three straight hits at the Korean box office, Director CHOI Dong-hoon assembled one of the glitziest Korean casts of all time for his latest jazzy crime crowd-pleaser The Thieves in 2012. Not only did the film surpass the director’s previous box office h...

FLU

The latest Korean hit in theaters, ASHFALL, is coming off its third weekend win but the film is just the latest disaster film to score big at the Korean box office. The disaster film trend in Korea kicked off with films like BONG Joon-ho’s The Host (2006) and ...

THE HAPPY LIFE

LEE Joon-ik is most well-known for his hit period dramas, which include Once Upon a Time in a Battlefield (2003), The King and the Clown (2005) which was briefly the most successful Korean film of all time, The Throne (2015) and Dongju: The Portrait of a Poet ...

GORYEOJANG

KIM Ki-young remains most famous for his five-film cycle that began in 1960 with The Housemaid and ended with Carnivorous Animals in 1984, but his other works are nowadays increasingly gain-ing appreciation. Among these is the wickedly gruesome and breathlessl...

CYRANO AGENCY

Heading into the directors’ chair for the fourth time in 2010 for Cyrano Agency, KIM Hyun-suk had already honed his talent as a purveyor of light and appealing sports comedies and romantic come-dies such as YMCA Baseball Team (2002) and When Romance Meets Dest...

THE TOWER

CJ Entertainment will be launching their last major assault on the box office later this month with their big-budget tentpole Ashfall, but this isn’t the first time the studio has presented a disaster spec-tacle during the Christmas season. Seven years ago, on...

KILLER TOON

By 2013 the K-horror trend had largely been relegated to a few low-budget chillers that failed to move either critics or viewers, coming and going with very little fanfare each summer. June 2013 welcomed minor new entries to the horror genre such as the omnibu...

ARANG

Classifications can be a dangerous thing, particularly when they set up unfair expectations for a film. This is perhaps what happened to the film Arang, a very modest box office player from 2006 with just over one million admissions that was largely mauled by ...

MOTEL CACTUS

After working as a producer for PARK Kwang-sun on To The Starry Island (1993)and JANG Sun-woo’s Cinema on the Road (1995), PARK Ki-yong made his directorial debut in 1997 with the omnibus feature Motel Cactus. Featuring stars such as JUNG Woo-sung and PARK Shi...