GENRE

Barking Dogs Never Bite

Bong Joon-ho’s first feature film, released in 2000, is slighter and less complex than his subsequent movies, and it failed so thoroughly at the...

The Thieves

Choi Dong-hoon’s The Thieves (2012) is a heist film that won numerous awards as well as achieving well-deserved success at the South Korean box...

Assassination

It’s no surprise that Choi Dong-hoon’s Assassination (2015) was such a box office hit, still—seven years after its release—sitting at number seven in South...

The Silent Sea

An enthralling, suspenseful thriller that plays out in an abandoned maze-like lunar station and back on a resource-depleted earth, The Silent Sea (Netflix 2021)...

Escape from Mogadishu

Ryoo Seung-wan is an accomplished director of action films inflected with comedy (Veteran) or horror (Svaha: The Sixth Finger), or telling the based-on-true-stories of...

Kingdom

There are two seasons of Kingdom to date (2019 and 2020), as well as a 2021 feature-length prequel, Kingdom: Ashin of the North: all...

Coffee Prince

Lee Jung-ah was well-known as a prolific novelist before she adapted her frothy book The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince into a TV series...

Vagabond

This high-speed political thriller (SBS 2019) reunites the romantic leads of historical fantasy series Gu Family Book (2013), Lee Seung-gi and Bae Suzy, both...

The Housemaid

Kim Ki-young’s seething, intense The Housemaid (1960) is a domestic horror film with more psychological heft—and visual precision—than the 2010 remake by Im Sang-soo....

Recalled

The Hitchcock-inspired Recalled (2021) is the directorial debut of Seo Yoo-min, screenwriter for The Last Princess, and fuelled by slow-burning suspense—not least about whether...