As is often the case, I was out of town for the London East Asia Film Festival, so I missed the international premiere of the Director’s Cut of Cho Jungrae’s The Singer. I’m not sure if the previously available version has had a formal international premiere – probably not, given the devastation that Covid has … [Read More]
Category: Film reviews and comment (page 2)
LKL’s list of ten Squid Game superlatives
Well, I guess everyone who’s going to watch it has watched it already, but nevertheless I’ve tried to avoid any major spoilers in the below. Here’s the list of things that struck me most about the hit series. Most enjoyable reveal Runner up was the identity of the multi-gazillionaire who set up the game, But the … [Read More]
Minari (미나리, 2020) review: resilience, sacrifice and the American dream
Set in 1980s rural America, Minari follows a Korean immigrant family divided by ambition, fear and responsibility. Created from a semi-autobiographical perspective, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari is a wholly engaging example of exemplary family drama overall, standing as a virtual definition of personal and familial resilience in its absolute realism, in the process. [Read More]
Minari: a movie re-viewed
After my first viewing, I was wondering whether to recommend Minari to my friends and family. If I’d bought an expensive cinema ticket to see it then I would have only seen it once. However, I bought a ticket that licensed me to view it as many times as I wanted within a 24 hour … [Read More]
Beasts Clawing at Straws (지푸라기라도 잡고 싶은 짐승들, 2020) review: murder and mayhem in a droll game of cat and mouse
Intersecting stories of debt-ridden lives converge around a cash-filled bag, revealing an intricately structured, non-linear thriller. Beasts Clawing at Straws is a twisted cat and mouse tale of betrayal and mayhem with a genuinely droll tone throughout, virtually guaranteeing audience enjoyment and even (guilty) smiles in the face of murder. [Read More]
Moonlit Winter (윤희에게, 2019) review: a poetic exploration of catharsis, memory and queer identity
Lim Dae-hyung’s Moonlit Winter follows a mother and daughter’s trip to Japan that becomes a reckoning with a hidden same-sex past. Through restrained performances it explores repression, guilt and intergenerational secrecy, framing physical travel as a path toward emotional thaw. A palpable emotional depth pervades virtually every scene, making for a wholly worthwhile experience. [Read More]
The Call (콜, 2020) review: a searing horror twist on Korean cinema’s time-connection tropes
Regardless of being based on a British/Puerto Rican film, The Call feels wholly Korean through and through. With a tour de force performance from actress Yeon Jung-seo, The Call is ultimately one of the strongest contemporary Korean horror/thrillers of recent years that respectfully tips its hat to classic Korean cinema too. [Read More]
A review of the Korean cultural year 2020
It would be an understatement to say that the cultural year 2020 has been markedly different from previous years. The pandemic has had a huge impact on the cultural scene, with most live events cancelled and event promoters falling back on the internet to provide us with our cultural fixes. Some of these attempts have … [Read More]
Review: Hong Sang-soo – The Woman who Ran
The time was right. Not having seen a Hong Sang-soo film for a few years – and he himself has had an unusual two-year break since his last one – I was perhaps ready to reacquaint myself with his work. It was a cold misty winter’s afternoon. I had just taken a rare day off … [Read More]
Moving On (남매의 여름밤, 2019) review: family, abandonment, and the quiet weight of letting go
Set within a multigenerational household, gentle, nuanced and heartfelt, Yoon Dan-bi’s Moving On deftly uses the minutiae of everyday life to tell an easily relatable, poignant tale that will feel wholly personal to viewers, especially those who have watched elderly relatives becoming increasingly frail as they wearily move through their twilight years. [Read More]
Bori (나는보리, 2018) review: the girl who yearns to be deaf
Always quietly spoken but nonetheless screaming of candour throughout, Kim Jin-yu’s Bori deftly inverts common disability tropes seen in Korean cinema by centering on an able-bodied child’s perspective to underline their all-important message all the more in an original, sweetly engaging and ultimately uplifting way. [Read More]
Movie review: Peninsula. Four years after Train to Busan, the zombies rule the streets…
We’re four years on from the zombie pandemic that ravaged the Korea that we saw in Train to Busan (2016). The port city proved to be no refuge from the rampaging menace, and the zombies took over the country. Some lucky few of the non-infected escaped by sea, but no country wanted to receive the … [Read More]
Peninsula (반도, 2020) review: a high-octane zombie heist lacking its predecessor’s heart
Peninsula largely fulfils the requisites for a blockbuster action/horror in a basic sense, but more depth to the narrative and more fully fledged characters rather than caricatures could have allowed it to step so much further towards the genre busting originality that drew so many of us to classic Korean cinema in the first place. [Read More]
The Closet (클로젯, 2020) review: shamanic horror meets human reality
The Closet blends supernatural horror with hi-tech shamanic ritual as a grieving father searches for his missing daughter. This wholly engaging, often genuinely creepy, horror deftly uses spiritualism in the fight of light against dark and is also a serious societal critique, the palpable poignancy of which easily raises its worthiness yet further. [Read More]
Why Crash Landing on You had us hooked
What a preposterous scenario for a drama. A chaebol heiress goes paragliding, gets swept away by a freak tornado and lands north of the DMZ, where she is discovered by a North Korean soldier and ends up getting emotionally entangled. I loved it. Of course, the scenario is a lot more complicated than that. How … [Read More]
Sky Castle: would you believe, the first K-drama I’ve ever watched. And what fun it is!
People might find it strange that, despite the fact that I’ve been following Korean culture for 20 years now, I’ve never watched a complete TV Drama series. There have been several reasons for this, but basically it boils down to lack of time, and the prohibitive cost of the DVD boxed sets. I made the … [Read More]