Tag Archives: Song Kang-ho

Review: Emergency Declaration

Given its star power and large cinematic canvas, this disaster film would qualify as a blockbuster had it been made by Hollywood in the 70s or 80s. Nowadays it would just seem anachronistic, but since it was made in South … Continue reading

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Review: Broker

It’s understandable why, following his biggest international hit, Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2018, Hirokazu Kore-eda decided to make two movies outside of Japan. Shoplifters was, relatively speaking, a critical and commercial hit in his native … Continue reading

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Review: The King’s Letters

The last we saw of King Sejong, he had completed a map of the stars with the help of former slave Jang Yeong-sil. Given that King Sejong is one of the most commonly portrayed historical figures in Korean cinema, I … Continue reading

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Review: Parasite

The class dynamics exploited in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, certainly the movie of the year regardless of what you think about it, gives rise at first to comedy of the most uncomfortable kind. This has always been Bong’s strong point, though … Continue reading

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December 2017 movies

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the December issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on Nov. 25. The Age of Shadows Set during the Japanese colonial period of the 1920s, Kim Jee-woon’s double agent thriller … Continue reading

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BIFF 2017

Here is my Japan Times story about this year’s Busan International Film Festival. As is always the case, space restrictions prevented me from writing all I wanted to write about the festival and the movies I saw, though, for the … Continue reading

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September 2012 movies

Here are the movies I reviewed for the Sept. issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last weekend. Carlos In one of his numerous trite pronouncements, the internationally famous terrorist born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez in Venezuela who later … Continue reading

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