K-dramas (from South Korea), have been making a huge impact on Netflix in the past few years (e.g. Squid Game), with one of them, The Glory, making it into the top 10 for 2023. Gyeongseong Creature arrived with much hype, with the irresistible pairing of a couple of well-loved actors – Park Seo-Jun and Han…
Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of Japan’s greatest living filmmakers. You could mount a case he’s the greatest living Japanese filmmaker if you exclude animation (and thus, Hayao Miyazaki). In 2013, he took home the Special Jury Prize from the same event for Like Father, Like Son. In 2018, he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes…
In the still-hot realm of Korean cinema, few directors are hotter than Park Chan-wook. The creative force behind Oldboy, The Handmaiden and the miniseries The Little Drummer Girl is back with an intriguing twist on film noir with Decision to Leave. This film owes much to the master of the genre, Alfred Hitchcock, but Park…
Everything Korean seems to be raging right now – from Squid Game to K-Pop to Korean fried chicken and beer. But these things did not just appear overnight, And much like all of those examples, Korean crime fiction has been bubbling along in the background just waiting for the West to discover it. And there…
Not to be confused with the so-so 2014 supernatural themed thriller starring Eric Bana, Deliver Us From Evil is a frenetic and violent hard-boiled action thriller from Korean director Won-Chang Hong (who wrote films like The Yellow Sea). It delivers plenty of action and will delight fans of this genre. Korean action cinema seems to…
When I wrote about Burning earlier this year, I mentioned that East Asian cinema was having something of a “moment”. Well, that “moment” continues with Joon Ho Bong’s Palme d’Or (2019) winner, Parasite. A veteran of Korean cinema, Bong is probably best known here for 2013’s Snowpiercer. Sci-fi has been his forte, so Parasite is…
