Grass: Sang-soo Hong

To read this review, go to: http://www.unseenfilms.net/2018/10/nate-hood-takes-in-grass-2018-nyff-2018.html.

Rating: 4/10

Burning: Chang-dong Lee

To read this review, go to: http://www.unseenfilms.net/2018/10/nate-hood-on-burning-2018-nyff2018.html.

Rating: 7/10

Microhabitat: Jeon Go-Woon

To read this review, go to: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/review/122941/what-happened-to-the-new-york-asian-film-festivals-main-slate-a-bewildered-retrospective/.

Rating: 7/10

The Truth Beneath: Lee Kyoung-mi

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/new-york-asian-film-festival-2017-japan-southeast-asia-south-korea-sampler/.

8/10

Split: Kook-Hee Choi

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/new-york-asian-film-festival-2017-japan-southeast-asia-south-korea-sampler/.

5/10

Okja: Bong Joon Ho

Bong Joon-ho’s OKJA is the perfectly emblematic of the genre-warping, expectation-thwarting, emotionally devastating cinema so perfected by the South Koreans within the last few decades. The fact that it’s an American co-production financed and distributed by Netflix is a dream come true: this might be yet another important step for South Korean cinema to finally get its dues here in the States. The film is audacious in how it allows the story to dictate its tone, not the other way around. At first, it’s like a Studio Ghibli fantasy between Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) and the eponymous super-pig. Then it becomes a heist film as she tries to rescue her alongside the Animal Liberation Front. Then it becomes a corporate thriller. And finally, a stark tragedy as they save Okja. And not once does it miss a beat. Simply put, I want more. More American/South Korean co-productions. More Joon-ho films. More films with so much reckless creativity. 

8/10

Jane: Cho Hyun-hoon

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/nyaff-main/.

3/10

The Wailing: Na Hong-jin

I liked Na Hong-jin's The Wailing despite not understanding a damn thing that happened in the third act. So...was the oni Jesus? Was that woman in white a good spirit? If the old man was evil, why did the film treat him like an innocent for much of the second act, including the scene where he hides down the side of a cliff? I get the feeling that all of these questions and more are probably answered within The Wailing, but you can only get at them after re-watching the film several times. But I also appreciated The Wailing as an emotional, aesthetic experience. It's so beautiful, so lyrical: the perpetually rainy woods is one of my favorite settings, after all. It's also a masterwork of tone: it amps up the creepiness and discomfort like a symphony. Maybe I'll revisit this film one day. But I don't know. One viewing was emotionally catastrophic enough.

7/10

The Bacchus Lady: E J-yong

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/nyaff-round-up-4-mr-six-2015-alone-2015-the-bacchus-lady-2016/82054.

8/10

Alone: Park Hong-min

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/nyaff-round-up-4-mr-six-2015-alone-2015-the-bacchus-lady-2016/82054.

7/10

The Boys Who Cried Wolf: Kim Jin-hwang

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/nyaff-round-up-2-grace-2016-the-boys-who-cried-wolf-2016/81625.

3/10

The Priests: Jang Jae-hyun

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/nyaff-round-up-1-the-bodyguard-2016-the-priests-2015/81484.

8/10

Oldboy: Park Chan-Wook

[Revisit Review]

This time around, I found Park Chan-Wook's storytelling to be a bit lacking in his 2003 film Oldboy. Don't get me wrong: it's a fantastic movie that seems to have been constructed around a menageries of emotional apexes. It's stylish, creative, and wholly original. The central concept alone of a man being imprisoned for 15 years for reasons he doesn't understand is one of the most ingenious in the last two decades of the cinema. So the film's narrative hiccups can be easily overlooked. Oldboy is just one more reminder that during the 2000s South Korean cinema reached new heights of quality that made Hollywood seem populated by rank amateurs.

9/10

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance: Park Chan-wook

[Revisit Review]

Park Chan-wook knows how to play his spectators like puppets. He knows exactly how he wants his audience to feel in every single scene. And what's more, he knows how to achieve it. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance isn't just, in my opinion, Chan-wook's best film, but it's also the best Asian film of the 2000s. While there is an incredible amount of violence, I think most audiences will miss the fact that by and large most of it is depicted off-screen. Why? Because it feels so real that you don't notice the violence's visual obstruction. The film’s only failing is that it doesn’t achieve Park’s stated goal of proving that revenge is futile. Because here, revenge TOTALLY succeeds. So this is less of a cautionary tale than a very grandiose version of the Death Wish plot formula.

10/10

Holiday: Lee Man-hee

It isn’t a requisite to like a protagonist for a film to be great. They can be a bastard. But as long as they're an interesting bastard, we can go along with them. Such is the case with Heo Wuk, the protagonist of Lee Man-hee's Holiday. He’s not a good person. He steals from his friends to finance his girlfriend's abortion and then cheats on her while she is having the operation. But we can get a grasp on his volatile emotions. They don’t excuse his terrible actions, but they do explain them. This film was original made in 1968 but was only released in 2005 because of censorship. It was immediately heralded as a masterpiece. But I disagree. The film is too languid, too morose to be more properly devastating. Many of the shots are curiously over-exposed and washed out. A lot of shots are curiously over-exposed. But I wonder if that was just due to the quality of the copy of the print that I watched (which is somewhat unlikely considering the fact that I watched it on the official youtube channel of the Korean Film Archive). It’s so damn tempting to declare censored, lost, or restored films misplaced classics. But we must guard ourselves against labeling them as such when they might not actually deserve it. And, unfortunately, I think this is one such case.

6/10

Splendid Outing: Soo-yong Kim

Soo-yong Kim's Splendid Outing hit me like a stick of dynamite. The film haunted my thoughts for days after I watched it. I could not get it out of my head. I earnestly believe that if it was given a proper restoration and promotion here in the States, it would be heralded as a triumph of world cinema. A feminist parable masquerading as a horror film (or perhaps the other way around), Splendid Outing tells the story of Gong Do-hui, a high-powered business executive and women's rights icon who is mistaken for the runaway wife of a rural fisherman by a group of hired thugs, kidnapped, and trapped on a distant island, and brutally beaten and raped by her "husband." The husband slobbers about as a barely coherent drunk with psychotic, sadistic tendencies. Her new "daughter" is a cripple who is quick to scream and cry (and incite her father's wrath upon Gong) whenever she feels neglected. But if the father is too stupid to notice that Gong isn't his missing wife,  the daughter almost certainly knows within an instant that Gong isn't her real mother. After several failed attempts, Gong manages to escape from the island after a year and return to the mainland. However, she discovers that the police have mistaken another dead woman for her. She also finds that she has been forgotten by the company that she once worked for. Indeed, one of the most painful moments of the film is when we realize that the company probably deliberately forgot about her because she was a woman who had the audacity to hold power over her male co-workers. With her children long since moved away and an unwanted baby in her belly, Gong kills herself while screaming her name one last time. And yet, this isn't the end of the film. I won't give away the ending, but it transforms an already exhaustive parable into an uneasy glance into the internalized masochism that perhaps infects many feminists. Another underlying theme in Splendid Outing is the complicity of many women in destructive patriarchal societies. A group of women kidnap Gong, the crippled daughter and her grandmother either encourage or deliberately provoke the husband's abusive behavior, and when she returns to the mainland she discovers that her feminist group has been hijacked by a woman who promotes a faith-based pro-life agenda. I can't remember the last time a film so violently shook me to my core. Splendid Outing is a nightmarish Korean response to Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Woman in the Dunes (1964). But whereas that film depicts its protagonist's imprisonment in an exploitative society as an accidental twist of fate, Splendid Outing argues that such imprisonment not only can happen, but does happen to millions upon millions of women all over the world.

9/10

The Old Jar Craftsman: Choi Ha-won

Choi Ha-won's The Old Jar Craftsman is a luscious, beautiful film that succeeds because of its extreme emotional histrionics, not in spite of them. Based on a short story by Hwang Soon-won, it is more allegory by way of its human characters than merely a fictional tale set in a specific time and place. It reminds me of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) in this regard. The film is about an elderly potter who one day discovers a young woman almost frozen to death in a forest. He saves her life and they eventually marry and have a son. But one day a young man enters their lives...the same young man whom the potter's wife tried to kill herself for. He has been searching for her for seven years and wants her back. He psychologically torments the woman until she runs away with him, abandoning her husband and young son. The potter despairs, has his son adopted by a wealthy family, and kills himself by diving into his kiln. Years later, his grown son visits his father's grave where he discovers that his mother has wasted away prostrating herself there for forgiveness. The two tearfully reconcile. Three things truly make The Old Jar Craftsman shine. First is You Young-gil's cinematography which makes the Korean countryside spring to life in dazzling color and beauty. The second is Hwang Hae's turn as the elderly potter. He is portrayed as a well-meaning innocent for most of the film. Watch how he refuses to sexually assault her when he first rescues her (although the scene where he rubs her frozen body to restore body heat is highly erotic). When he screams that his missing wife deserves to die, we realize that it is the incomprehensible grief talking and not some deep-seated misogyny. For this is a man for whom violence is incomprehensible. The third excellent part of The Old Jar Craftsman is the prolonged sequence where the potter's wife is psychologically tortured by her missing lover. The way Ha-won uses sound to denote psychological torment seems to predict Zhang Yimou's use of the sound of a foot massager in Raise the Red Lantern (1991).

8/10