Country: Korea
Genre: Drama
Director: Yun-ho Yang
Year: 2007

Rating:

NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
Faithful readers will no doubt recall that I consider Jerry Bruckheimer responsible for indirectly ruining more action movies, through his bad example, than any other director alive. Directors of the world: stop imitating Jerry Bruckheimer! Unless you’re only trying to make money, that is, because artistically, […]

Country: Korea
Genre: Action/Drama
Director: Woo-Suk Kang
Year: 2003

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK
Silmido starts out like a Korean Dirty Dozen. After a botched North Korean raid, in which the South Korean President is injured, the South Koreans retaliate by creating a commando unit composed of death row inmates, whose purpose it is to assassinate the leader of North Korea, […]

Country: Korea
Genre: Action/Drama/Romance
Director: Ha Yu
Year: 2008

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
Leave it to the Koreans to create a love story that shames Hollywood with an intelligent adult treatment of forbidden love.
As a young man, the King (Jin-mo Ju) decides to create an honor guard that he can fully trust, drafting young boys and having them trained […]

Country: Korea
Genre: Drama
Director: Chang-dong Lee
Year: 1997

Rating:

NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
There have been dozens of films about young men without prospects being lured into a life of crime, but most of them are melodramas, focusing on action, violence, and florid emotions. Green Fish is different from those flicks because it is a realistic drama.
Makdong (Suk-kyu […]

Country: Korea
Genre: Horror/Drama/Suspense
Director: Yoon-Hyun Chang
Year: 1999

Rating:

NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
Somebody is leaving Hefty bags full of mix and match dismembered corpses around Seoul for passerby to find. So begins Tell Me Something, a would-be horror mystery.
Detective Cho (Suk-kyu Han), a disgraced cop who looked the other way at a criminal enterprise in return for having […]

Country: Korea
Genre: Horror/ Suspense/ Comedy/ Drama/ Action
Director: Hong-jin Na
Year: 2008

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
American critics are fond of saying that today’s movies are “dark.” The Dark Knight Returns is dark. Sin City is dark. Watchmen is dark. Bullshit. You want dark? Watch Korean movies.
A case in point is Chaser.
After Joong-ho Eom (Yun-seok Kim) was […]

Country: Korea
Genre: Action/Drama/Comedy
Director: Ha Yu
Year: 2006

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK
Considering that there are a number of brutal and well-choreographed brawls in A Dirty Carnival utilizing baseball bats, pipes, and knives, why is it that the dominant emotional tone isn’t excitement but rather overwhelming sorrow?
Kim Byung-doo (In-seong Jo) may be a gangster, but his life seems awfully […]

Country: Korea
Genre: Drama/Action/Comedy
Director: Woo-Suk Kang
Year: 2003

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Public Enemy follows the separate stories of two men, but you just know that they’re fated to meet.
Cheol-jung Kang (Kyung-gu Sol) is a screwed up cop, the type who robs drug dealers of their product so he can sell it himself, but Internal Affairs can’t pin […]

Country: Korea
Genre: Action/Drama
Director: Je-gyu Kang
Year: 1999

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
Tae Guk Gi has been compared to Saving Private Ryan. Thank God the comparison doesn’t hold.
There is nothing in Tae Guk Gi which is as brilliant as the Normandy sequence from Saving Private Ryan, but neither does it veer from stark realism to grotesque sentimentality and […]

Country: Korea
Genre: Drama/Comedy/Horror
Director: Joon-ho Bong
Year: 2003

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK
Alert readers might recall that I recently reviewed director Bong Joon-ho’s creature feature The Host. I thought it was an interesting deconstruction of a typical monster movie. Later on, when I became aware of another Korean movie called Memories of Murder, I noticed that Bong Joon-ho was […]