“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…
For Hong Sang-soo, whose working method and steady output has been, and continues to be, (relatively) unburdened by production constraints, the notion of artistic…
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,…
Lengthy runtimes have never been totally essential to Hong Sang-soo’s work, but there is a certain quality intrinsic to his approach — how he…
As with many Hong Sang-soo films, 2009’s Like You Know It All deliberately repeats itself: Goo Kyeong-nam (Kim Tae-woo), an arthouse director, goes on two…
Hong Sang-soo’s 2009 film Night and Day marks many firsts for the director, including his first film shot on digital and his first to…
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…
The first striking thing about 2006’s Woman Is the Future of Man is its blunt exhibition of various cruel and brutal sexual behaviors, which…
In 2005’s Tale of Cinema, as in most of Hong Sang-soo’s works, structure is part of the story. The film is split into two…
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…
“I should correct something if it’s wrong,” says Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju), the titular virgin of 2000’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, to her…
Two strong, entirely unrelated stories are told in 1998’s The Power of Kangwon Province — and Hong Sang-soo resorts to employing a third narrative…
A retrospective look at the first feature by any major auteur tends to bring-out some desire for a grand analysis of their work —…
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…
Yesterday, we presented our Top 10 Albums of the Year (So Far). Today, we do the same for film — which also gives us the chance…
The finest films of 2017 simultaneously offered us a respite from, and a deeper reflection on, our fraught and fractured social and political realities.…
In our second dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (the first is here), we take a look at the veteran Polish filmmaker…
Most seem to agree at this point that the Cannes Film Festival’s competition line-up was not good this year. While the New York Film Festival’s…