TEENAGE HOOKER BECOME KILLING MACHINE

Films like Old Boy (2003) and A Bittersweet Life (2005) have shaped how we view Korean genre cinema, but even before those polished entries of cinematic violence explored on the scene in the early years of the new millennium, there existed earlier low-budget p...

TAZZA: THE HIGH ROLLERS

This year’s Chuseok holidays will welcome the return of one of Korea’s most popular film series, as Tazza: One Eyed Jack, the third film in the popular crime series, is set to hit screens on September 11. For this week’s K-Cinema Library, we’re travelling back...

A DAY OFF

One of the towering figures of Korean cinema, LEE Man-hee passed away in 1975 at the age of 44, during which time he made 51 films, though only half of those remain in circulation. Among his many classic works, A Day Off, one of four films he made in 1968, is ...

THE MAN FROM NOWHERE

With a strong leading performance by dashing heartthrob WON Bin, The Man From Nowhere combined revenge and melodrama tropes to thrilling effect on its way to becoming the highest grossing Korean film of 2010. Borrowing many of the elements that put Korean thri...

HELPLESS

Based on Japanese crime author MIYABE Miyuki’s best-selling novel ‘All She Was Worth’, originally published in 1992, Helpless (2012) is the third work by director BYUN Young-joo and helped to established KIM Min-hee not just as a well-known face, but as a majo...

SEOPYEONJE

Widely considered the crowning achievement of Korea’s most widely respected filmmaker, IM Kwon-taek’s Seopyeonje (1993) encapsulated the Korean experience and the pain of its modern history in a story about the dying musical art of Pansori that avoids historic...

HAUNTERS

Super-powered characters and visual effects-driven narratives are fairly common in today’s Korean film landscape but it wasn’t that long ago when sci-fi was more or less absent from Korean screens. It was in that environment when, in late 2010, the sci-fi acti...

THE NIGHT BEFORE STRIKE

Though by no means the first, The Night Before Strike (1990) is considered one of the most important early independent films in Korean cinema. Made on a shoestring budget of KRW 20 million (USD 29,000 at the time the film was released), the film was produced b...

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...