Even for a career with no discernable lack of winter pictures (cf. The Day He Arrives, The Day After), Hotel by the River stands out as Hong Sang-soo’s coldest film to date. Set in a curiously unfrequented hotel by the Han River, in the dead of winter, the…

Of the three films Hong Sang-soo made in 2017, with actress and romantic partner Kim Min-hee, two were released in the U.S. in the spring of 2018 — shortly after his latest film, Grass (which also stars Kim), premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. As always, the hyper-productive…

Distilled down to a one-sentence summary, the calmly melancholic Right Now, Wrong Then is the very essence of a Hong Sang-soo film: A bibulous director pursues an alluring young woman, and things go awry. With its sad, voluble characters drowning their problems in soju; its laconic narrative; those…

Let the Sunshine In is an exquisite romantic comedy in part because its laughs are sad and its sadness is funny. Claire Denis isn’t a filmmaker to let the complexity of the human emotions she either captures physically, or insinuates psychologically, settle into easy interpretation and understanding; her…

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is an exemplary minor film, shaped more by its incidental pleasures than any grand design. It owes much of its charm to actress Jung Eun-chae, as Haewon; Jung’s natural exuberance is used to energize Hong’s characterization of Haewon, who appears to us as a dreamy,…

Hong Sang-soo’s monochromatic, soju-soaked, metaphysical odyssey, The Day He Arrives, explores the question of whether or not one can ever really escape the past, but as considered through the filter of Hong’s signature narrative tropes. Over the course of a three-day visit to Seoul, Seong-jun (Hong regular Yoo…

“Things repeat themselves with differences I can’t understand,” proclaims Oki (Jung Yu-mi), the director of the fourth, and final, film-within-the-film that comprises Hong Sang-soo’s 2012 feature Oki’s Movie. She has attempted to compare and contrast two relationships that she had — one with a professor (Mun Seong-kun), one…

True to its title, 2010’s Hahaha is very funny — amusing in ways that might even cloak its generous, searching ambition. The film follows two skirt-chasing, barely-employed Korean men: Joong-sik (Yoo Jun-sang), a depressed film critic pursuing an extramarital affair, and Moon-kyung (Kim Sang-kyung), a director set to leave for…

As perhaps the most narratively straightforward Hong Sang-soo film to date, albeit one still prone to a certain structural mischievousness, Woman on the Beach modulates its conceptual restraint in such a languid way as to allow its characters room to breathe. Interestingly, despite this active divergence of approach, Woman on the Beach opens with…

In Hong Sang-soo’s 2002 film On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, a young actor, Gyung-soo (Kim Sang-kyung), goes on vacation to visit an old friend; he hangs out and drinks with his buddy and the two take a ferry trip to, but do not actually visit, the…

A retrospective look at the first feature by any major auteur tends to bring-out some desire for a grand analysis of their work — and often, looking at the beginnings of a certain style and how it’s been refined over time can be of more interest than assessing…

When Hong Sang-soo made his debut feature, 1996’s The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, the South Korean cinema had not yet developed into the internationally acknowledged movement it is today. With accomplished debuts from Lee Chang-dong and Bong Joon-ho coming soon after, Hong would seem to ride…

Jia Zhang-ke has long been a master of conflating the personal and the political, charting large societal upheavals with a surprising intimacy. Ash Is Purest White is no exception. Following gang moll Qiao (Zhao Tao) from 2001 to 2017, Ash opens with Zhao’s character and her boyfriend Bin (Fan Liao) making…

The 2018 New York Film Festival just wrapped over the weekend — which means it’s curtains for 2018’s fall festival season (I’m so sorry). Our first dispatch tackles Main Slate selections from the fest that we haven’t already covered (see our five Toronto Film Festival dispatches and Private Life), and that we don’t…

When asked why he murdered ten people over an eight-day period, the unnamed narrator of Bruce Springsteen’s epic “Nebraska” replies, “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” In many ways, that statement sums up the central theme of Springsteen’s sixth album: 1982’s Nebraska is a a study…

In an effort to reboot our music coverage, In Review Online is launching monthly features devoted to reviewing new album releases. Last month, we launced εὐδαιμονία (or, Eudaimonia), which we’re presenting in collaboration with the upcoming quarterly journal of the same name, and which will spotlight five worthwhile contemporary music releases,…

Our fourth dispatch from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s the first, the second, and the third) continues sifting through the various cinematic voices, styles, and pedigrees that make-up this year’s official slate. This time, we offer our takes on a big historical epic from a mainstay of international cinema (Mike Leigh’s Peterloo), the sophomore feature from…

In an effort to reboot our music coverage, In Review Online has launched monthly features devoted to reviewing new album releases. One such feature is What Would Meek Do? — in which SoundCloud junkies Paul Attard and Joe Biglin run down some of the latest rap releases. The second issue of What Would…

“Jealousy is a disease / die slow,” Nicki Minaj whispers to her critics at the end of “Majesty.” It’s devilish — almost pure evil — for the star to wish death upon those envious of her success. Between encouraging fans to harass said critics and enabling the sex-offender…

Our third dispatch from the Toronto International Film Festival (here’s the first and here’s the second) includes our takes on a few hold-overs from this year’s Cannes slate (Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, Gaspar Noe’s Climax, Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun), a couple of mammoth documentaries (Wang Bing’s Dead Souls, Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana), high-concept films…

Anime visionary Masaaki Yuasa’s first feature since his 2004 breakthrough Mind Game (though kid-friendly Lu Over the Wall made it to the U.S. first), The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl applies the director’s fluid, warped, and dazzlingly colorful trademark style to a fanciful fable about love, fate, and the…