Following the wedding preparations of a gay, middle to upper middle-class Catholic couple as they seek to be married in the Catholic faith, Abigail Honor and Yan Vizinberg’s Saints and Sinners is a lighthearted and sincere, but largely superficial exploration of the issues faced by homosexual couples searching for inclusion, acceptance, and basic human rights […]
Night and Day, 2008
In a way, Night and Day continues the narrative bifurcation of Hong San-soo’s earlier work while converging towards Luis Buñuel’s late period films in conflating reality with sublimated desire. A married, middle-aged painter, Sun-nam (Kim Youngho), having impulsively run off to Paris in order to avoid a confrontation with police following a pot smoking incident, […]
Woman on the Beach, 2006
After observing Hong Sang-soo’s previous three films bucolically retreating within a predictable safety zone of recurring preoccupations and reflexive encounters illustrated through linear narratives in somewhat uncharacteristic fashion following what had been his most structurally experimental film to date, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, it is refreshing to see Hong crystallize his now familiar […]
A Tale of Cinema, 2005
Hong Sang-soo makes a refreshing – and much welcomed – return to form with his most structurally complex, insightful, and thematically multilayered, yet deceptively facile and satisfying film since Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors in Tale of Cinema. The curious introduction of a narrative voice-over and the appearance of formalized, zooming into close-up – […]
Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, 2000
A dashing and affluent man named Jae-hoon (Jeong Bo-seok) arrives alone at a hotel resort and begins to occupy his time lazing about (and cursorily inspecting the ventilation system of) the empty, comfortable suite until the anxious distraction of a telephone call from his mobile phone – auspiciously ringing the tune of a tin-pot, synthesized […]
The Power of Kangwon Province, 1998
Aboard a crowded overnight passenger train bound for the seaside resort of Kangwon province, an exhausted, half-asleep, standing commuter momentarily drifts into annoyed consciousness after having been bumped into by an oblivious, bespectacled, casually dressed man named Jaewan (Chun Jaehyun) on his way back to an adjoining car after purchasing refreshments and snacks from a […]