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...

GHOST HOUSE

At the peak of their powers, director KIM Sang-jin and star CHA Seung-won, working together for the fourth time, made the comedy-horror sensation Ghost House, which became the fourth most well-attended Korean of 2004 with 2.89 million viewers, owing to its aff...

THE TAE BAEK MOUNTAINS

After topping the yearly box office chart three times in the early 1990s, with The General’s Son (1990), The General’s Son 2 (1991) and Seopyeonje (1993), rather than rest on his laurels, director IM Kwon-taek tackled one of his most ambitious projects ever wi...

RADIO STAR

Most people associate director LEE Joon-ik with the period drama genre, following such massive hits as The King and the Clown (2005) and The Throne (2015), but another genre that he has con-sistently found himself in is the music drama. He’s made four so far, ...

THE QUIET FAMILY

This month 21 years ago, as the Korean film industry was beginning to enter its modern era, one surprising work emerged that created a new paradigm for local genre cinema by reinventing the horror and comedy genres. That film was the modern classic The Quiet F...

WAY BACK HOME

One of Korea’s most respected performers, JEON Do-yeon returned to screens following a two-year hiatus in the winter of 2013 in Way Back Home, a prison drama based on the true story of an ordinary housewife ripped from her family and forced to spend two years ...

ARCHITECTURE 101

One of the most long-standing production companies of the current Korean film scene, Myung Films proved themselves to be a powerhouse once more in March 2012, when they released the smash hit Architecture 101 (2012). Despite the romantic drama having fallen ou...

BLOODY FIGHT IN IRON-ROCK VALLEY

The term ‘Kimchi Western’ largely owes its existence to the KIM Jee-woon period action blockbuster The Good, the Bad and the Weird (2008), but the Korean-style western has occasionally surfaced since then, perhaps most notably in the low-budget genre film Bloo...