A visual piece of film.

From Asian latitudes, Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai serves serious family drama with the classic father figure at the center. Although heavy on symbols, it is coolly performed, well played and a whole that feels magnificently composed.

The points of contact are many and emotional as Father Lin returns to the family he once abandoned. His son has died in a hostage drama and the loose ends of the past are exacting their toll.

Absent fathers, also known as the ultimate pigs, have long been a constant companion. It seems we all suffer from the loss that only an absent father's embrace can cause and the question looms, are all fathers pigs? The setup here is already clear and rather it is about a human exploration in the art of abandonment.

In this way, Chongqing Blues is far from an innovative film, possibly more sigh-inducingly boring. But despite many prejudices, this is a beautiful film, not only on the surface but also in content. Admittedly heavy on symbols where Xiaoshuai seems to want us to read way too much into a look, movement or thing, bordering on sentimentally careless but by all means, it works.

The portrait of the father who has left his wife and child is brilliantly done by Wang Xueqi as he tries lostly to collect the rubble of a life. Neither over-the-top nor explosive, a strong ensemble overall succeeds in conveying a touching story through deep if not always long-lasting characters.

The visual composition is very similar to the narrated core of the film. The further you get, the more impressive becomes Xiaoshuai's slickness in terms of cutting and eye for picture details. The cross-cut flashbacks in particular send pleasant shivers through any movie buff.

And the interest in a not entirely original film is sustained by concrete content. It is thoughtful and purports to be an exploration into parenting and confession. It will hardly be to everyone's taste, Asian father drama, that goes without saying, but Chongqing Blues is a visual piece of film that is worth your time and attention.

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Masterpiece cast in silky noir.

The ultra-violence of the revenge trilogy feels distant when the Korean visionary Park Chan Wook serves delicious romance of the absolute highest class.

The irresistible scent of classic noir hangs like a dense fog over Park Chan Wook's latest opus. Decision to Leave (2022) undeniably has films like Double Indemnity (1944) and Vertigo (1958) to thank, but at the same time, Park Chan Wook is refreshingly unique in his filmmaking and voice as usual. It is not long before what is initially very "Hitchcockian" and familiar is taken in completely unexpected directions.

The story begins in an accident investigation led by the chronically melancholic police officer Jang Hae Joon (Park Hae Il). A middle-aged climber appears to have fallen from the mountain he was climbing and died instantly when he hit the ground. Most of Hae Joon's colleagues shrug their shoulders and want to shrug it off as quickly as possible, while he himself begins to turn the magnifying glass on the deceased's mysterious widow, Chinese Song Seo Rae (Tang Wei). Her cold nonchalance about what happened and her murky background means that Hae Joon is no longer so sure that her fate was an accident. The instant chemistry that develops between the two further complicates the case.

So far it feels like movies I've seen before but every minute of playtime me further away from them. What could steer towards a conventional investigative thriller instead becomes something far more dreamy and sublime. What generally results in something cold and hard instead turns into something warm and silky. With each passing scene, it becomes increasingly clear that the murder mystery and its "whodunit" question is completely subordinate to the central relationship and that it is a love story unfolding on the big screen, albeit a strange one. The corpses that keep turning up are just icing on a cake of passion and longing. Park Chan Wook's transformation into bloody romantic (something already noticed in 2016's The Handmaiden) is total, and I love it.

Given that's the direction Park Chan Wook chooses, it's Tang Wei and Park Hae Il that everything hinges on, because if you don't buy their almost Phantom Thread twisted romance, everything else falls like a house of cards. Fortunately, there are sparks about them from the first frame they share and it is with ease that one capitulates to their restrained "courtship" of each other. Hae Il's portrayal of someone stuck on autopilot in career and marriage only to gently thaw back to life is utterly devastating, and Tang Wei's multi-layered, vulnerable and utterly unique femme fatale interpretation will carry with me for a long time.

As always with Park Chan Wook's filmmaking, he maximizes the visual potential of every frame. Here he is more playful than in his previous works and allows everything from smartphones to GPSs to merge with the visual language and the result feels as hypermodern as it does classic. Aesthetically, he continues on the trail he opened with 2018's The Little Drummer Girl, allowing both set design and costuming to rise far beyond realism. There are strong reds, strong blues and strong greens, almost to the point that Pedro Almodóvar feels like a possible source of inspiration. Few filmmakers can pull off a visual feast of this breathtaking caliber.

When the incredible finale (incidentally the obvious peak of a film that conquers the epithet masterpiece in every scene) is over and the credits roll, I can't help but think of Michael Gambon's narration in the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar! (2016) and how he describes a film- "A potion of balm for the ache of a toiling mankind". That's exactly what Decision to Leave is, a soft and healing balm for the heart, brain and soul.

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Beautiful vegetarian propaganda.

A grand fantasy adventure that is fantastically entertaining and beautiful. Okja is a charming, funny and thought-provoking family film which, however, is not directly suitable for the youngest, but will amuse many others.

The fact that the Netflix-produced film Okja competed in Cannes raised a few eyebrows among the traditionalists. However, you have to think outside the box when you turn 70, and that's what the festival did in 2017.

The South Korean Bong Joon Ho, the man behind films like The Host and Snowpiercer, has written and directed this cute and visually spectacular fairy tale, with very dark tones between the lines.
The film is not easy to categorize as within its framework there is about as much comedy and farce as deep-seated drama and action. It is precisely this that gives the film extra points for innovative thinking, but at the same time risks making it somewhat difficult to grasp for parts of the audience, and above all it becomes difficult to say who its intended target group actually is.

The film is a kind of platonic love story between a girl and her pet.
Okja is one of all genetically engineered superpigs larger than a hippopotamus and has grown up with Mija, a little girl who lives up in the Korean mountains with her grandfather. Mija and Okja are best friends and really stick together through thick and thin. One day, however, everything changes when the Mirando Corporation, which once created Okja to become cheap food for the people, comes to bring her "home". But Mija is not one to give up on her friend so easily and encouraged by an animal rights group, she travels to the other side of the globe to save her life partner.

Essentially, then, the film is about unlikely but oh-so-strong friendship and takes place with the corrupt and sleazy (on more than one level) meat industry as a background. At the same time, the film conveys important messages about how the resources on earth should be distributed and urges us consumers to think. This is unusual in a film for younger people but all the more important for us all to take part.

A pale and easygoing Tilda Swinton plays the cool and calculating Lucy Mirando who is the CEO of the heartless company intent on mass producing cheap meat. And of course she is perfect in the role. Her colleague, the eccentric zoologist Dr. Johnny Wilcox is played by an energetic Jake Gyllenhaal who is quite funny, although perhaps not as convincing. Admittedly, it's a lot of fun to see him doing slapstick and rampaging around like I've never seen him do before, but it's grossly overplayed and not always justified. To some extent, it is certainly forgivable to stretch the expressions, as both his and Tilda Swinton's characters are caricatures, although it feels like Jake Gyllenhaal is sometimes almost having a little too much fun himself, at the expense of a lot of credibility.
Other roles include the always-watchable Paul Dano, Steven Yeun and Lily Collins. Young talent Ahn Seo-Hyun plays Mija and succeeds in an unexpectedly convincing way in creating a relationship with a giant animal that is mostly computer-animated.

Okja is a different and very nice film that absolutely deserves its audience. It's a bit uneven between turns and I sometimes feel that the humor should have been turned up a bit, only to suddenly feel that it could have been toned down. This ambivalence is a little disruptive to the overall experience and I would have liked Bong Joon Ho to decide to take it either way.

In the end, despite some flaws, this is a very lovely and heartwarming film that I undoubtedly enjoy very much.

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A melancholic road trip about abandonment.

In his first Korean-language film, Shoplifters director Hirokazu Kore Eda takes us on a rewarding road trip with an odd group of abandoned people. Think Little Miss Sunshine but instead of a beauty pageant, the group tries to sell a baby on the black market... Literally.

At one point, Sang Hyun and Dong Soo are described as child brokers, and considering the kind of business they run, that's probably an apt description.

In some countries, such as South Korea, there are so-called baby hatches where mothers can anonymously leave their babies behind (there are arguments for and against the system that will not be elaborated here). Dong Soo, a baby hatch worker, together with Sang Hyun, a laundry owner, decide to steal a baby to sell to rich and desperate couples who cannot cope with South Korea's complicated adoption laws.

So Young, the young mother who abandoned the baby, discovers them and decides to join them on a road trip to find the best candidates to adopt her child. Broker is about responsibility and forgiveness. It reflects on the family we find in the course of life, and the family we have to let go of along the way.

What Sang Hyun and Dong Soo do isn't very moral, it's a form of human trafficking after all, but the movie doesn't show them as bad people. At the same time, So Young is not a bad person either, even though she tried to abandon her child. The central characters in the story have all been abandoned in some way, be it a divorce or in an orphanage. They all want to give this child a good home with a financially secure family, and they know that won't happen through the legal system of their country.

It is a tragic but poetic coincidence that Broker was released at the same time as the news about abortion rights in the US. The film may feel a little different now because of that, but the focus here is on children who, due to circumstances beyond their control, feel they shouldn't have been born. In Broker there are no decisions that feel right. How can one even choose when it comes to possibly abandoning their child? The magic is how well Kore Eda maps that conflict.

With such broken characters, heavy themes, and dark thoughts about parenting and abandoning children, Broker could have resulted in a much more depressing film. It is thanks to how well Kore Eda is able to balance these ideas along with hope and humor that makes the result more uplifting. The deeper questions are there for anyone who wants to read into what the film has to say, but it's not a barrier to entry to a meaningful experience.

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Gripping drama about thieves who steal your heart.

That blood is not thicker than water is at the center of Hirokazu Koreeda's family drama Shoplifters. A beautiful film that offers both uplifting humanism and some unexpected twists.

It is clear that Koreeda has family as his most important subject when making films. Or rather the lack of family. In previous films such as Nobody Knows or Like Father, Like Son (both prize winners at Cannes) he explores how to create your own community even if you are not born into it. That theme is most clearly repeated in Shoplifters.

Here, in the beginning, we meet Osamu (Franky Lily) and a boy who smoothly picks up goods in a store without paying. But on their way home, they suddenly see a freezing little girl who seems to have run away from her destructive parents. They decide that she can accompany them to their house, where 3 women, one of whom is a grandmother, also live. At first, the girl is waiting, but the slightly messy and loud gathering in the family means that she will soon be living there indefinitely.

At first glance, it is nothing more than that. We get to follow the lives of the various family members and see how they try to cope with everyday life with little money. And really that would have been enough. Koreeda is a master at portraying everyday situations that don't really have much to say, but are completely fascinating to us moviegoers.

But Shoplifters also have other sides. With about a third of the film remaining, Koreeda reshuffles the cards and takes the story to unexpected lands. It works surprisingly well and is a good move purely dramaturgically.

The actors are all excellent, not least the 2 children, and the film is tight, but beautifully shot in all its everydayness. As usual, Koreeda does not go for the sentimental, but mainly spices up the story with a humanism that is really felt right down to the heart.

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Everything you could want from a movie. Old Boy is EVERYTHING you could want from a movie!

Park Chan Wook is a mastermind - First Joint Security Area and then The Vengeance Trilogy! It says something about film journalists that nobody wrote about Park Chan Wook before Oldboy won the grand jury prize at Cannes 2004. Oldboy is the second part (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was the first) in a planned revenge trilogy. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is the third and final instalment.

Dae-su wakes up in an empty room. The door is locked, no windows. His only company is the television. He gets food through a hatch. He works out, writes in his diary. Via the television, he learns that he is wanted for the murder of his wife. His daughter has been adopted by a Swedish couple (a fun small detail because a Swedish soldier also figures in Joint Security Area.) He has been stripped of everything that matters and worst of all, he doesn't know what he did to deserve it! He is fixed, every day is the same. Claustrophobia turns to despair. He tries to commit suicide but fails. After 15 years he is released. Who locked him up?! Why was he locked up!? Why was he released?!

The film is based on a Japanese manga.

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Absurd, twisted and deliciously dark family saga.

The gap between the poor and the rich is depicted with sharp humor, unexpected twists and a lot of darkness in Bong Joon-ho's Parasite. It's a lovely black comedy about the most twisted household since Dogtooth.

Despite unemployment and poverty, Ki-taek and his family manage to keep their spirits up. Mom, dad and two soon-to-be-grown children are crammed into a shabby basement in a run-down alley, constantly looking for odd jobs and free wifi. The family doesn't have much, but they have a nice cohesion, cordial jargon and ambitions for a better life.

When the son Ki-woo receives a tip about a job with a rich family, the possibilities for an extra income open up. With a forged university diploma, he gets a job as an English teacher for the Park family's teenage daughter. Also living in the luxurious villa is a businessman, his housewife, a quiet guy who mostly expresses himself through drawings, and the housekeeper who keeps everyone in order.

Ki-woo soon seizes the chance to arrange a job for his sister, Ki-jung, as the boy's "art therapist". He advises Mrs. Park of "a talented acquaintance," who is "probably very busy," but he will do his best to arrange a meeting. On false credentials and with made-up names, both siblings have soon tricked themselves into employment with the wealthy family.

How long can they keep up the lies, and how far can the charade go? This is just the beginning of a twisted scenario that Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer, Okja) has so masterfully directed. Here is the DNA of both the Sune family and the absurd Greek Dogtooth (2009) from Yorgos Lanthimos. While Parasite feels completely original, never predictable, and impossible to put into a single genre box.

Comedy and tragedy go hand in hand through Bong's twisty corridors, and you never know what awaits around the next corner. Parasite is a film that is best experienced without knowing anything in advance. It's an entertaining story that grabs me early on with its delightful humor, and then just tightens its grip more and more as the film goes on.

Not entirely unsurprisingly, the director also talks about the gaps between those who have money and those who have none. You can see the film as a commentary on a society where the poor take desperate measures to climb out of their misery, and where the rich turn a blind eye to what is happening in the outside world. Bong Joon-ho has made one of the best movies of 2019, and I'm loving every second of it!

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Lots of action but messy script.

When Squid Games Lee Jungjae takes the director's chair to give his version of what the machinations of the South Korean security police in the 80s might have looked like, there is no shortage of impressive action scenes. Lee Jungjae and Jung Woosung in the lead roles make up a charismatic duo, but on the whole, Hunt is unfortunately a fairly messy film experience...

The year is 1983, 4 years after the fall of dictator Park Chunghee. But the new president is also a dictator, which provokes protests from the South Korean immigrant population in the United States before his visit. “Drive him out,” they shout, and when the South Korean officials wonder why they can't just drive the protesters away, Park Pyongho (Lee Jungjae), the head of the foreign affairs unit of Korea's Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), patiently replies that they can't in the US (and gets the somewhat sarcastic answer that the protesters have very strong opinions about the homeland after abandoning it…).
 
The introduction shows the difference between the free country in the West, and the censorship and corruption back home. Because soon Park Pyungho is back in South Korea, where protesters are beaten and tortured, where corruption is high, and where you don't know who you can trust. Especially not as it is revealed that there is a North Korean spy within the KCIA, someone who goes by the code name "Donglim".
 
Park Pyungho is tasked with identifying the spy, but the same task is also assigned to Kim Jungdo (Jung Woo-sung) of the KCIA's domestic unit, which gives rise to an intense power struggle. Park Pyungho is a veteran of the agency while Kim Jungdo is a newcomer from the Korean Army. Park Pyungho comes across as the more sympathetic and righteous of the two men, especially as he condemns Kim Jungdo's use of torture in his interrogation methods. It turns out that he has his own experiences with these as Kim Jungdo previously interrogated him, which left him with permanent nerve damage in his hand.
 
Lee Jungjae is a lovely anti-hero (for sure, there are male melodrama ingredients here, the reluctant legal fighter who suffers the heavy injustices of life, and selflessly risks his life, accompanied by melancholic music). A tough guy who installs a corrupt leader within the unit, and protects the young and beautiful but secretive college student Yoojung (Go Younjung). He seems to have taken to her since her father was killed, but their actual relationship remains unclear for most of the film. Here we get some sort of explanation at the end, but everything else leaves us with question marks.
 
Because the spectacularly well-choreographed action sequences aren't always narratively supported enough to justify them. Much of the violence is unprovoked, and serves no narrative function. You almost get a little sense of what a German crime drama would look like if it was accidentally mixed with splatter. A traditional film adaptation cut together here and there, with interspersed violence from ear files to mass shootings and car chases and everything in between. The plot becomes difficult to follow.
 
This makes the movie experience a bit frustrating after a while. Spectacular action sequences and close-ups of the charismatic Lee Jungjae are not enough to fully sustain interest throughout the film's 2 hours and 11 minutes. Crime dramas and spy films work best with methodically planted clues that, while surprising, move the story forward - A story you can follow and understand.
 
Hunt carries too many secrets, too much unprovoked violence, and too dark motives. The characters may be moving in a time of psychological terror, where everyone around them is a potential enemy, but the script that conveys this must still be the audience's friend.

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Murderous children's games of the highest quality.

Are you in the game - Can you endure the game? The contestants of the hit series Squid Game may have thought that children's games were a simple match, but it turned out to be a delicate balance between life and death - Depicted in an absolutely brilliant way in this nerve-wracking Korean series.

If you have everything to lose, well, you might as well lose everything. The almost 500 participants in the mysterious Squid Game are all hand-picked because they have one thing in common - They are all so destitute that they barely have anything to live for. Above their heads hang literally millions of won and herons, which in their situation and opinion could solve all their problems. The crux is that they have to get through a number of challenges - But they also have to win over the other participants.

Gi-Hun (Lee Jung-jae) is one of them - A daydreaming loser obsessed with gambling, something that has put him at odds with both his aging mother and his neglected 10-year-old daughter. When the chance in the form of a chuckling businessman (Gong Yoo, superstar from, among others, Train to Busan) appears, he quickly seizes it. Child's play, it can be very easy to get through and it is as planned so that he can grab the many well-pressed bundles of bills.

But if you lose in the games, well then you lose your life too. What begins with a chaotic Red-Green light soon leads to increasingly complicated games, and even behind the colorful backdrop of the game, trouble begins - Both with the participants but also within the other closed doors behind this giant puzzle land. Parallel to the bloody exciting games going on, we get to follow a detective (Wi Ha-Joon) who tries to uncover what is really happening - And why.

The entire world's Netflix audience seems to have opened their eyes to the mildly nerve-wracking and stress-filled massacres of children's games in the Korean Squid Game. Seasoned viewers of Korean K-dramas will see the usual depth of character mixed with thoughtfulness and a light dose of sentimentality. There is a moral to everything that happens on our screen - Nothing is really just a coincidence. At times it can be predictable, but how the story is told and how detailed it is can be at least as important as the result.

Psychological games and who we really are under pressure, we've seen that before. But rarely has it been done in such a charged, heartbreaking, and well-written way as in Squid Game - Which is also heavily sprinkled with social criticism. Is it our fault – Or is it the system's fault? Stay far away from the Hollywood of capitalism - No paws at a remake of Squid Game, then you have missed the point.

The disputes and thorns in Squid Game are many, and nerve-wracking. The series will keep you curled up and as if on pins and needles, throughout all of the series' nine clever and well-made episodes. Follow the k-hype with Parasite, Burning and Minari - But whatever you do - Skip the unnatural dubbing!

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