South Korea
Kieron Tyler
With its familiar scenario of massed zombies on the offensive against the living, South Korean blockbuster Train to Busan stands or falls on the fresh twists in brings to the table. For director Yeon Sang-ho’s first feature with live actors – previous films The Fake, King of Pigs and Seoul Station were animated – he sets the action on a high-speed train hurtling towards a zombie-free zone on which hordes of zombies are sniffing out the unafflicted. Its prequel, Seoul Station, was also a zombie film and set in the titular train station and its trains. Train to Busan, so to speak, leaves the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the extras on the DVD release of The Wailing, South Korean director Na Hong-Jin says, “Every genre of film has its own strengths and weaknesses. By combining many genres you could say that I was able to build and emphasise the strengths, while diminishing the weaknesses.” And indeed, over its monumental 156 minutes, The Wailing attempts to meld comedy, an overt homage to The Exorcist, zombie movie tropes and social commentary. Unfortunately, the different stylistic elements play off against each other instead of melding into a cohesive whole, making The Wailing lack consistent tension.The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When a lead character is warned that “it’s easier to be scrutinised in a small town”, it’s instantly clear they are not going to take the advice, keep their head down and make sure they don’t attract attention. In South Korean director July Jung’s first full-length feature, police chief Young-nam inevitably makes her presence felt soon after her arrival from Seoul in the southern coastal region of Yeosu.Although A Girl at My Door explores small-town hierarchies and tensions, and the rifts and violence barely below the surface, it has to be taken as a commentary on South Korea overall as well Read more ...
David Nice
In one way, it makes sense to give your London comeback concert in the venue where you made your European debut 44 years ago. Yet the Royal Festival Hall is a mighty big place for a violin-and-piano recital. Kyung Wha Chung had no problem nearly filling it last night with an audience including whole Korean families, but might have wished she hadn’t in the ailment-ridden dead of winter; her look could have killed a coughing child ("go and get a glass of water" is what I think I heard her say, from my very distant seat). There were swathes of panache in an emotionally demanding programme, but Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We learn from the front titles of Pieta that it’s Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, and it won the Korean director the Golden Lion award at last year’s Venice film festival, against strong competition. Viewers may be asking themselves a rather different question, however, namely how much do we actually look forward to a new movie from Kim? We’re a decade on from one of his masterpieces, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, with its meditative visual beauty, but that one was very much the exception in the director’s oeuvre to date.Almost all Kim's other films have been marked by varying degrees Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
The rise of Korean pop (or K-pop, for short) in Europe has been steady; conceivably, all that’s needed for the common or garden music fan to become enraptured is one crossover artist. Countless new acts sprung up following the first wave of K-idols - G.O.D., SES, H.O.T., Shinhwa - and a new one continues to appear almost every week, unveiled after years of training. They often live in boarding schools with strict diets and no guarantee of success, a regime for which the Korean culture industry is estimated to have generated some $3 billion. K-pop has started influencing western Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A comedy of alienation, estrangement, and magical metamorphosis – if ever there was a Shakespeare play made for the linguistic transfigurations of the Globe to Globe season it’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unmoored from the familiar English text and cast adrift in a forest of mischievous Korean spirits, you couldn’t wish for livelier or more bewitchingly colourful guides than the actors of the Yohangza Theatre Company.Shakespeare’s best-loved play gets a boldly South Korean re-write in the hands of Yohangza. Oberon and Titania become Gabi and Dot, king and queen of the Dokkebi (Korea’s own Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In his catalogue essay, Peter Osborne discusses the meaning of epithets such as “new” and “contemporary” when applied to current art, yet no one in this year’s New Contemporaries seems to be striving to make work that is “new”, “different”, “radical”, “challenging”, “avant-garde” or even “eye-catching” – to name just a few of the attributes supposed to make an artwork significant, relevant or desirable. As a result, this show of work by recent graduates is remarkably free of melodrama, posturing, narcissism, self-pity or self-importance – tedious qualities so often found in recent art. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Director Bong Joon-ho watched Psycho as he prepared his latest film, one of the most discomfiting visions of mother-love since Norman Bates last ran a motel. There is Hitchcockian perversity, too, in Bong’s casting of Kim Hye-ja, an iconic Korean actress specialising in benign mothers, as a far more troubled maternal spirit. This nameless mother will do anything for her son, which feels like a threat as much as a promise, as Bong’s gothically atmospheric melodrama plays out.Hye-ja is the elderly single mother of Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin), a 27-year-old who has a child’s mental age, and is Read more ...