South Korea
Director Hong Sang-Soo’s latest effort, On The Beach At Night Alone, is one of his most deeply autobiographical (and best!) to date, but it isn’t particularly accessible for newcomers to his filmography.
With strong performances and flawless filming, The Villainess briefly losses its identity before concluding with a stunning finish.
We’re addressing what other people are saying about Okja – in particular, its most common criticisms, and why they’re wrong.
The Handmaiden is director Park Chan-wook’s most explicit film to date, if only in its portrayals of warped male sexuality contrasted with the comparatively emotive sexuality of women.
When the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ranked global education systems in 2015, South Korea came in third. Its strict, demanding schools feed off the country’s zeal for education, with many people believing that your performance in school will determine your lifelong socioeconomic status. Given the country’s recent history, this assumption is far from unfounded.
Jin Mo-young’s debut documentary feature, My Love, Don’t Cross That River, is extremely touching, and from solely watching the trailer of this South-Korean film, you can see why. Released for the festival circuit in 2014, Jin shows us a 98-year-old Jo Byeong-man and 89-year-old Kang Kye-yeol, who’d been married for 76 years. Jin filmed the elderly couple in their mountain village home in Hoengsong County, Gangwon Province for 15 months.
Growing up as a first generation Asian American, I looked to television and cinema for hints to “fit in” with all the other Americans, to improve my grammar and English, to embrace the idea of being American. In that transition, I severed some of my Filipino roots. I can understand Tagalog, but I can’t speak it.
Every year I seem to arrive at an impasse with horror films. Like many other lovers of the genre out there, we will always have love for Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers (just tell Rob Zombie to cut it out). But when you’ve seen one too many teens by the lake, and you hear Freddy say “bitch” one time too many, you realize there’s more to the genre than just blood lust and hockey masks.
Nowadays it’s fair to say “gangster films” are in a league of their own, no longer thought of as sub-genre of the action film. Thus freeing them to operate on an entirely new frequency in the model created by earlier classics such as The Godfather or Goodfellas. These movies are indeed classic but have you ever thought about organized crime outside of the United States?
The first time I saw Chungking Express, I didn’t realize what love was. An over-dramatic statement, but Wong Kar-Wai films are truly worth viewing. It’s about the human condition in terms of emotional separation from each other.
Every time you look for new horror movies the same ten titles show up. The Shining, Jaws, The Exorcist, The Haunting, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien, Halloween, The Ring, and Night of the Living Dead. Not to say that these aren’t great films, they’re on the best lists for a reason; they’re classics!
There is only one theatre within reasonable driving distance where I can go to see the smaller, limited release films that come out. On their website they list any small film as an “art film”. When I finished watching Snowpiercer this title seemed like a complete misnomer.
There are a million great films outside the U.S, it’s just you haven’t seen them. Good fortune smiles on you today because I’m here to show 15 foreign flicks you should have seen a long time ago.