Reviews

When friendship, joy, and courage stand tall, death almost feels insignificant. So many people go through life without ever truly experiencing these.

The director tells a heavy story through a fairy-tale. Focusing on kids with AIDS is a meaningful choice. Sure, some scenes feel a bit cliché, but the scenery is gorgeous, and the young actors perform so naturally that you really feel the emotion.

This woman in the movie really feels like a waste of time. She doesn't seem to understand love or marriage at all.

This is the director’s first feature film, and I’d say it’s one of the best debut works I’ve seen. I can’t help but wonder if the director was influenced by film noir. The storyline, where the female lead and her lover plot to kill her husband, immediately brings Double Indemnity to mind. Plus, the detective character feels like a classic nod to the tropes of noir films.

In a way, this doesn’t even feel like a typical movie. Throughout its nearly two-hour runtime, you can barely sense the presence of the camera. The characters don’t seem like they’re acting—they feel like they’re just living their lives. As an audience, we’re simply observing their world unfold.

This movie really got to me—it left me with a heavy heart. Honestly, every film by this director does that to me. The story mostly revolves around the Otsuta household, and through the perspective of a maid, we get a glimpse into the tough, bittersweet lives of geishas behind the scenes. By the end, it becomes clear through their conversations that their future doesn’t look bright. Even the small spark of hope Otsuta feels after recruiting new students seems like it might fade away soon.

If you watch this movie and feel like you don’t get it, that’s exactly the point. That’s what the director is trying to say. Life has no meaning, no clear beginning or end. You don’t really know what people are struggling for—at the end of it all, we all die.

Two years after this film, the director made the famous Paris, Texas. At this point, Wim Wenders seems to have realized the challenges he faced in America: should he choose between the classic and the modern, color or black and white—what truly reflects life and his inner self? He had to make a choice. After the producer was killed, the director had to face the world on his own. All he could do was pick up the camera and make his final stand. He couldn’t even identify a clear enemy, because the enemy was the space itself. It became a Don Quixote-like battle, even though fate seemed already sealed.

This movie tells the same story from two different perspectives, but it’s much more subtle this time around. If it weren’t for the last clip, you might not even realize it’s a story about a couple revisiting their old place. Once you know that, and then start thinking about the meals they shared, the roads they walked, and the cable cars they took, it completely changes how you see everything. Hong Sang-soo is truly amazing.

The director is a master at playing with film structure and loves using satire in his work. Both Hong Sang-soo and Luis Buñuel do this, but with a key difference: Buñuel’s satire targets the universal hypocrisy of human nature, while Hong Sang-soo is more focused on the hypocrisy of male intellectuals. If a woman really wants to understand what men are all about, she might want to take a few notes from Hong Sang-soo's films.

The main character carries a different colored plastic bag every day. Truly the mark of a great artist!

This is the director's longest film to date. Hong Sang-soo said the inspiration came from a late-night phone call he made from New York to South Korea. His wife was shopping at a mall in Seoul, where it was daytime, while in New York, it was the middle of the night. The difference in time zones inevitably influenced their emotional states—one person felt like sharing their thoughts, while the other was preoccupied with mundane things. Hong Sang-soo found this disjointed emotions intriguing: one person belonged to the night, the other to the day. That’s how Night and Day was born.

It seems like male directors from every country have a dream of making a Western, even if their country doesn’t have a “West.” For Koreans, that Western dream turned into making a chaos in China, poking fun at the Chinese, and taking down the Japanese. But really, isn’t the whole story still just about Koreans fighting Koreans?

This movie feels like a Korean version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. However, it doesn’t capture the essence of a Western, and honestly, it’s not even as entertaining as a typical Hollywood action movie.

As someone who likes watching a director's first film, I really didn’t like Hong Sang-soo’s debut. A lot of things were poorly done, and the pacing felt all over the place, which made the main character really annoying. The whole film felt unnecessarily long and just plain dull.

A pig falls into a well, and people rush over to see it. But when they look inside, all they see is their own embarrassed reflection at the bottom.

I watched this movie twice. Through the stories of two men, it tackles the big theme of how history, nationality, and culture are affected in the context of globalization. The film does this in a vivid and straightforward way that feels genuine and unpretentious.

Whenever I watch a movie about life on the grasslands, it fills me with a sense of peace. Back then, there were no big chimneys on the Hulunbuir Grassland, the Soviet Union hadn’t yet collapsed, and steam locomotives still pulled green trains. The film poignantly captures the inevitable loss and helplessness as industrialization overtakes the traditional grassland way of life.

Hsiao-Kang slows down all the clocks by seven hours for Shiang-Chyi, watches The 400 Blows over and over, and eats the cake she gave him, trying to connect with her somehow. But in the end, he still feels incredibly lonely. The director really captured the depth of isolated, helpless love perfectly.

This is the kind of movie most people would probably call boring, but by the end, I found myself on the verge of tears. The director weaves together the lonely lives of three people through the passage of time. Each of them tries desperately to connect with someone they can never truly reach, and the harder they try, the lonelier they become.