Little White Lies

Released 21 OCTOBER Invoking the words of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, Seo-rae – the femme fatale at the heart of Park Chanwook’s 11th narrative feature, Decision to Leave – issues a stark warning to Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), the earnest detectiv

It’s hard to imagine the clean-cut and kind-faced actor Park Hae-il being cast in a film by Park Chan-wook, whose work is so often populated by grotesques and monsters. And yet, in his role as a detective smitten by a sultry murder suspect (Tang Wei)

In Park Chan-wook’s seminal 2003 film Oldboy, its protagonist spends 15 years locked in a windowless room for reasons that are kept from him. Yet the director had explored the dramatic and psychological potential of domestic prisons to an even greate

The Chinese actor Tang Wei was catapulted to fame when she was selected from a massive casting process to play the lead in Ang Lee’s 2007 erotic period drama, Lust, Caution. The controversy caused by that film led her career down a few unexpected byw

It’s a comically garish setup, primed for vampiric gashing: cerulean walls; plush European decor; a grand piano; chequered floors’ and hefty ornamental chess pieces to boot. This torture chamber-cum-film set represents the opulent milieu of Park Chan

Park Chan-wook adopted a heightened neo-noir aesthetic for 2009’s Thirst, adapted from Émile Zola’s 1868 novel ‘Thérèse Raquin’ about a woman who convinces her lover to murder her husband. Park added in a vampiric curse and transported that central c

In Stoker, Park Chan-wook shows us the erotic potential of objects. The unbuckling of a leather belt. A foot sliding into a snakeskin stiletto. Fingers intertwining as they dance over piano keys in duet. When we enter the House of Park, the door is o

Desire is the double-edged panacea for loneliness in the cinema of Korean director Park Chan-wook. It’s seen in Song Kang-ho’s vampire preacher in 2010’s Thirst and the fanciful, battery-eating patients/lovers of 2005’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK. I

Karen Han is the author of ‘Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema’ published by Abrams New York and on sale at all good booksellers from November. We sent Karen a mini pop quiz on the writing process, gleaning a deeper appreciation for Bong’s cinema, and th

There’s nothing we love to do more than impose retrospective reasoning on Quentin Tarantino’s public declarations of love for art. QT named Park Chan-wook’s breakthrough feature JSA as one of the top 20 films made during his career as writer/director

A woman barely on the threshold of her elder years wakes up in her sister’s flat in Seoul, the camera slowly pulling away from her face before a matching motion takes in the cityscape outside the window. The mirroring camera movements create an immed

WORDS BY MARK ASCH Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the greatest of all films, has a void at its centre. In this story of an obsessive private investigator’s quest to unlock the mystery of a woman who might not exist, there is no “Madeleine,” not really –

Let’s face it: a bandage is hardly an accessory any of us want to wear. Jake (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown, his nostril cut viciously from the inside with a knife, certainly doesn’t want to wear a plaster on his nose for the rest of the film. And the

When you’re a film critic, people always ask, “What is your favourite film?”, and ever since 2013 I answer very quickly and easily: Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such A Beautiful Day. There are not many films that are shorthand for the genetic material of yo

Released 16 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Always a sucker for a creature feature. 4 ENJOYMENT. Influencers stop having kids challenge. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Finds great middle ground between heavy metaphor and practical monster fun. 4 Twelve-year-old Tinja (Sii

Released 30 SEPTEMBER At a secluded manor house, an avant-garde sonic catering collective begin a new residency at the behest of prim benefactor Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie). This unconventional art form involves turning the sounds of food and c

While our national cinema is dominated by ‘heritage’ stories, plucky underdog comedies and urban miserabilism, the films of writer/director Peter Strickland are eccentric outliers. In his latest, Flux Gourmet, he merges creative and digestive process

Released 2 SEPTEMBER Do you believe in soulmates? When it comes to cinema, I do. There’s a perfect match out there somewhere for every film, a viewer just waiting to be transported by whatever it is their cinematic soulmate has to offer. Three Thousa

Released 30 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Getting Booksmart vibes from this Finnish Sundance hit. 4 ENJOYMENT. Relatively low stakes make for a satisfying viewing experience. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A refreshing and truthful portrait of contemporary girlhood. 3 T

Some may remember him as the kid embracing puberty in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, but now Owen Kline is all grows up and making movies with the Safdie brothers. Here, he gives an account of his collecting habits, artistic inspirations an

Released 2 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. John Michael McDonagh returns with… Babel, but funny(-ish)? 3 ENJOYMENT. The question of how this messy situation will be resolved means it’s never dull. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Too muted and thinly written for its acerbic

Released 9 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. Enticing cast, festival buzz, let’s go, go, go. 4 ENJOYMENT. A little over-eager in hitting all of its slightly banal cultural touchstones. 3 IN RETROSPECT. Memo to Sennott and Pace: please work together again. 2 It

Released OUT NOW ANTICIPATION. Anvari’s previous film, Wounds, was a bit of an eccentric misfire. 3 ENJOYMENT. Looks like trash, but this compelling story defies easy expectation. 3 IN RETROSPECT. There’s more to it than meets the eye, and its subtle

In his award-winning debut feature, Under the Shadow, British-Iranian writer-director Babak Anvari explored the human cost of the Iran/Iraq conflict with a slow-burn supernatural horror set in 1980 Tehran. His follow-up, Wounds, a psychodrama set in

Released 9 SEPTEMBER Pity the fool who underestimates one of Claire Denis’ “small” films that she tends to make while waiting for the financing to come together on her bigger projects. We did it with the astonishing Let the Sunshine In, which she mad

After learning that the Dora Milaje in Marvel’s Black Panther were based on the real life Agojie warriors, director Gina Prince-Bythewood jumped at the chance to create an action epic that honours their legacy. The Woman King stars Viola Davis as the

Released 9 SEPTEMBER When we think about heist films, we conjour up images of fast car chases and men who think they are super hard. Scrap all that – apparently there’s a new way to do it. The Score, from writer and director Malachi Smyth, is a pande

Released OUT NOW ANTICIPATION. We enjoyed Indonesian director Edwin’s 2012 film, Postcards from the Zoo. 4 ENJOYMENT. Energising and original, even if it is hard to pin down tonally. 3 IN RETROSPECT. The late Suharto period as violent romance. 4 “Onl

Lena Dunham made her directorial debut in 2010 with Tiny Furniture before going on to helm one of the defining TV shows of the last decade. Five years after her acclaimed series Girls concluded its six-season run, Dunham is back with two coming-of-ag

Released 16 SEPTEMBER ANTICIPATION. A work by the great Chinese auteur arrives on screen, three years delayed. 3 ENJOYMENT. A rather spartan turn for Zhang, but compelling despite its muddiness. 3 IN RETROSPECT. A fascinating meta-narrative on film c

Released 22 SEPTEMBER If Kogonada’s debut feature Columbus navigated the fertile ground of how people relate to places, his follow-up moves onto the slightly more ambitious question of how we relate to the world at large. What shapes our understandin

The sense of quiet in Kogonada’s films is a heavy one: there is peace, but also a hushed sense of regret and grief, a contemplation of things lost you just have to sit with as time goes on. In 2017’s Columbus, that shines through in a conversation be

In her first book, ‘Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment’ culture critic and friend of LWLies Philippa Snow examines the fascinating, sometimes disturbing link between pain and performance, and deftly links togeth

Blu-ray/DVD Released 19 SEPT Menelik Shabazz was the subject of much celebration after his premature death in 2021, but, as a pioneering figure in the development of Black British cinema and a prolific, politically-engaged maker of both fiction and n

Blu-ray/DVD Released OCT Read anything about György Fehér’s Twilight and you will invariably see it described as “Twin Peaks directed by Béla Tarr.” The description is apt as Fehér was a longtime collaborator of Tarr’s, working as a writer on Werckme

Blu-ray/DVD Released 26 SEPT Made five decades into his career, A Fugitive from the Past is considered by many to be Tomu Uchida’s most significant work, in part because it is his most ambitious and epic. Adapted from Tsutomu Minakami’s 1,700 page no

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