13th London Korean Film Festival: Old Love Review

After living in Canada for many years, Yoon-hee returns to her home country of South Korea to visit her mother who has dementia. Taking a cigarette break outside Incheon airport, she runs into Jung-soo, an old college sweetheart. The pair is surprised to see each other and agrees to catch-up about the last twenty years…

3rd London East Asia Film Festival: The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion Review

After the rather minor success, accompanied by mostly unfavourable critiques of his 2017 feature V.I.P, a film where mediocre imagination ruled the depictions of cruel treatment of women, which turned it into a prosaic, occasionally sickening narrative, Park Hoon-jung, who penned The Unjust (2010) and I Saw the Devil (2010), has finally made a proper…

3rd London East Asia Film Festival: In Conversation with Park Hoon-jung and Kim Da-mi of ‘The Witch – Part 1. The Subversion’

Thanks to his distinctive and thoughtful writing style Park Hoon-jung has attracted a vast number of international and domestic fans for his work on Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil and Ryoo Seung-wan’s The Unjust. He then traded in his writing skills for directing, and in 2013 he made New World, an intriguing film that is arguably one of the most…

3rd London East Asia Film Festival: Dark Figure of Crime Review

Why are there so many unsolved/ghost murder cases out there in the world? Experts might work on as many as they can take on, yet they still cannot solve the crimes that go unnoticed. To the victims’ families, the agony of not knowing what happened to their loved ones is beyond one’s comprehension. But how do…

23rd Busan Internationational Film Festival: House of Hummingbird Review

Hummingbirds are the smallest of birds, with their tiny wings flapping away even faster than their heartbeats, unless they experience torpor, a hibernation-like state that hummingbirds use to protect themselves from the cold. Even though they are tiny, they build nests that have been named among the most exquisite wonders of nature. Much like hummingbirds, there…

62nd BFI London Film Festival: The Spy Gone North Review

The historical drama is a tale that is constantly over-shadowed by its real-life counterpart’s undoing. No matter which way the film may elude to direct itself, the foreboding presence of certain real-life individuals makes clear to an audience which way the film will steer. This is especially the case when dealing with the infamous Kim…