DERANGED

After months of limited activity amid the new normal of social distancing, the rising summer temperatures may prove very persuasive as residents coping with the niggling lifestyle of Covid-19 era look to escape their homes. Perhaps then the 2013 summer hit Der...

EARLY RAIN

During Korea’s Golden Age of Melodrama in the 1960s, romance was king, but while studio hands were busy churning out countless romantic tales, swapping around the era’s top screen talent, a new voice arrived on the scene with something very different to say. A...

THE FACE READER

Joseon Era royal succession dramas are exceedingly common in Korean cinema but sometimes all it takes is a fresh and confident approach to remind viewers why the format is so popular to begin with. HAN Jae-rim’s third film The Face Reader (2013) is just such a...

A MIDSUMMER’S FANTASIA

Indie filmmaker JANG Kun-jae laid his roots with Eighteen (2010) and Sleepless Night (2012), a pair of low-key and richly rewarding features that put him on the map and despite not finding many viewers at home, they gave him plenty of festival exposure and ens...

MASQUERADE

The period drama has been a staple of Korean cinema ever since cameras first started rolling in the country in the early 20th century, but in the early 2010s the genre experienced a surge in popularity as the industry started to recover and to welcome record n...

MOTHER AND A GUEST

Often cited as one of the greatest Korean cinema classics, SHIN Sang-ok’s Mother and a Guest (1961), in addition to perhaps being Director SHIN’s masterpiece, may well be the definitive ‘literary film’, a term reserved for elegant adaptations of respected lite...

NEW WORLD

Two years after his little-seen period chamber piece The Showdown (2011), Director PARK Hoon-jung, who had drawn a lot of attention for the scripts he penned for KIM Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (2010) and RYOO Seung-wan’s The Unjust (2010), truly cemented his p...

INSIDE MEN: THE ORIGINAL

Director WOO Min-ho and actor LEE Byung-hun are currently lording over the charts in their Lunar New Year hit political drama The Man Standing Next, but it’s not the first or even the second time they’ve done so, following the massive success of Inside Men. Th...

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...