Everyone knows you don't give out your social security number or your bank account digits or your password codes over the phone. But old people forget. As do people in dire circumstances — like those with a burned-down house and no substantial savings. Citizen of a Kind's Deuk-hee (Ra Mi-ran) falls into this latter category. A homeless mother with two children and no money for daycare or rent, she's scammed on her cell during a shift at the laundromat where she works (and sleeps illegally at night). When she temporarily loses custody of her kids, she's propelled into action to track down the ..read more

Coming from the poorest side of town in the Phllippines, streetfighting gambler turned big-time heir Marco (Kang Tae-ju) naturally has no one to turn to once he gets to South Korea. His newly discovered, snarky half-brother (Kim Kang-woo) wants him dead, his long-missing father (Choi Jung-woo) on life support wants him dead, and his conniving little half-sister (Jung Lael) wants him dead — universally for uniquely self-serving reasons. The other new people in his life are a pair of kidnappers — a man (Kim Seon-ho) and a woman (Go Ara) — working independently from each other yet sharing a desi ..read more

A compulsive, unemployed video game player (Ji Chang-wook) gets framed for a murder. Sounds fun! Except Fabricated City also has a nasty prison rape and terrifying jailhouse beatings as well. Too real for you? Well, our falsely convicted young man is a former Tae Kwon Doh champ who can MacGyver a dart-thrower behind bars and protect his pressure points when under assault — as one sympathetic murderer keenly observes. Too preposterous? Okay, then you're really going to recoil when our ill-fated hero gets visited by the dead! As for me, Fabricated City is my kind of movie! Strategic self-mutila ..read more

The Korean movie Turandot has infinitely more to do with Broadway musicals than Puccini operas but it does call to mind those PBS specials (of both realms) in which live productions are recorded then televised for mass consumption. As such, choruses stand around idly when the principals sing; leads also hold poses in anticipation of their first lyric when a song begins. As someone who's spent a good amount of time in the theater, I don't mind these static moments but someone expecting an experience akin to Chicago or Cabaret might easily feel otherwise. But for those game for a Live From Linc ..read more

Now that we carry our phones wherever we go and sit at desks topped by computers with cameras, our activities and whereabouts are pretty much monitored from dawn to dusk. Is paranoia inevitable? Or has this technologically invasive element turned us into performers 24/7? Either way, the news station crew in CCTV is having a particularly rough go of it today. Because their on-the-job recordings are being invaded by a murderous spirit, recalling a sordid past. Maybe its presence will make them more cautious because they're certainly not letting those recording devices inhibit them from committi ..read more

In Seire, superstitions aren't necessarily true but believing in them certainly shapes behavior. The big taboo in Park Kang's horror flick is doing anything unusual or untoward in the first few weeks following your baby's birth. Apparently, going to a funeral or — heaven forbid! — a burial can have disastrous consequences: Every apple you slice in half will be rotten to the core; your infant is going to get a sudden fever; you're going to start committing petty crimes — even stooping so low as to rob a homeless man in the streets. And then there are the nightmares. Seire isn't exactly frighte ..read more

You think you have it rough? Consider the life of Loh Kiwan, a North Korean refugee (Song Joong-ki) who flees with his mother to China, only to flee again on his own to Brussels where he's got no friends, no family, and very little money (which he loses soon enough). To stay he's going to have to prove his nationality but how do you do that exactly when your country of origin doesn't share birth records and your first second home has its own bureucractic complications compounded by the fact that you were — by necessity — living a secret life. There's more. You can't get a legal job. You don't ..read more

As of March 2024, South Korea has yet to send a spaceship to the moon but given that other countires have — the U.S., China, Russia, Israel, and India — I don't know if I'd classify Moon as science fiction so much as a speculative drama. In short... What if Korea sent three men in a rocket intended for a lunar landing but then it exploded? Then what if history repeated itself again, except the second time one (Do Kyung-soo) of the astronauts was the son of one of the old ones? As an added twist, you could always have the primary advisor (Sol Kyung-gu) be associated with the earlier disaster ..read more

Aside from BTS and Bong Joon-ho, most Americans probably don't consider South Korea a major player on the world stage. As for North Korea, they've been designated as a longshot threat run by an insane leader with a hot temper and nuclear weaponry. I don't know if such hierarchical political views of the earth do us well. We all occupy the same planet and wars between two nations can assume global importance soon enough. Israel and Palestine, anyone? In truth, the conflicts, genocides, uprisings and dictatorships concern us all. As Toni Morrison once put it: "The function of freedom is to free ..read more

Kim Ji-hoon's Sinkhole is a disaster comedy with one serious problem: The script introduces two children among the various residents who live in a doomed tenement about to get swallowed up by the earth then, like the other characters sharing their subterranean fate, abandons the kids for too long. I, for one, spent a lot of time impatiently waiting for the building's super (Cha Seung-won), the newest tenant (Park Dong-won), and two housewarming guests (Lee Kwang-soo and Kim Hye-jun) to stop griping about cell phone service and mud-covered chicken and to start searching for the two forgotten y ..read more