South Korea
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After a brace of gritty, socially charged animated films, director Yeon Sang-ho’s live-action debut proves a commercial juggernaut on its way to setting box office records in his native South… Read More
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Park Chan-wook returns to his homeland with this deliciously knowing and ridiculously camp tale of deception and seduction. Listen to my review (at 29:55) Read More
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Hot on the heels of the excellent Veteran , Inside Men is a similarly slick South Korean thriller exposing high-level corruption in equally brutal and compelling fashion. Read my review Read More
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A renegade cop takes on the spoilt heir of a family-run conglomerate in Ryoo Seung-wan’s tightly-paced and sharp-witted crime thriller Veteran. Read my review Read More
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Since his 18th birthday, Woo-jin has awoken each morning as a different person. His age, gender, even race can change. He has no way of controlling it and there is… Read More
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The New York Asian Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, boasting an impressive array of selections from the best of Asian Cinema past and present. Below I’ve collected together my reviews… Read More
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South Korean indie provocateur Lee Sang-woo returns with the third and final instalment in his thematic “bad family” trilogy, which follows three grown up brothers, reunited when their pedophile father… Read More
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Following the success of Masquerade last year, South Korea has rediscovered its taste for period drama chamber pieces, and Lee Jae-gyu’s The Fatal Encounter more than delivers, both in dramatic… Read More
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Following the success of Masquerade last year, South Korea has rediscovered its taste for period drama chamber pieces, and Lee Jae-gyu’s The Fatal Encounter more than delivers, both in dramatic… Read More
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Packed with violence, humour, machismo, revenge & more quirk than most Korean revenge thrillers, but the anarchic genre-bending spirit of the director’s almost indefinable previous film, Save The Green Planet,… Read More
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10 years after he is colluded into participating in the gang rape of a classmate, a young man is still haunted by his crime. Approaching a Christian support group in… Read More
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When her grandfather dies, 15-year-old Wei Wei (Xu Jiao) inherits his circus, particularly their star attraction: a baseball-playing gorilla, Ling Ling. Unfortunately, she also inherits his huge gambling debts and… Read More
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The closing film at PiFan this year was this modest, yet mostly effective thriller starring Ha Jung-woo as a shamed TV anchor, now radio DJ, who is forced back on… Read More
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There was such a giddy sense of anticipation for Bong Joon-ho’s first English language film that ultimate disappointment seemed almost inevitable. But, where his countrymen Park Chan-wook and Kim Ji-woon… Read More
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Intriguing Korean thriller about the pressures of studying at an elite boarding school and the lengths the top students will go to in order to maintain their grades and get… Read More
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While Fernando is otherwise engaged relocating himself somewhere new in Asia, James is joined by special guest Pierce Conran (@pierceconran) from Twitch and Modern Korean Cinema, to discuss the highlights… Read More
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I’m ashamed to say that I’ve largely allowed the films of Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong to pass me by until now. I did catch Poetry (although I much preferred Bong… Read More
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I had heard decidedly mixed things about Ryu Seung-wan’s latest Korean action thriller, so was pleasantly surprised by this neo-Cold War tale of duplicitous North and South Korean agents working… Read More
The James Marsh film review archive 