Korea 6
The Shower
By Andrew Osmond. The Shower is a 48-minute Korean animated film screening this coming Saturday (3rd November) as part of the London Korean Film Festival. The venue is the Phoenix Cinema at noon, and tickets are available here. It depicts an encounter between two young children, a boy and girl teetering on adolescence in a […]
The Handmaiden
by Jeremy Clarke. Weighing in at a lengthy two and a half hours, this lavish, sexually-explicit, South Korean pot-boiler is based on Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith, but moves the location from Victorian England to Japanese colonial-era Korea.
Seoul Station
By Andrew Osmond. It’s not unknown for live-action films to have “companion” films in animation, usually made as spin-offs. The classic case is The Animatrix, a Japanese-Korean anthology made to tie in with The Matrix Reloaded, and the better of the two. Another anime anthology, Batman: Gotham Knight was theoretically tied in with The Dark […]
Age of Shadows
by Jeremy Clarke. The Age of Shadows opens with an unexpected Warner Bros. logo, confirming it as the Hollywood studio’s first Korean-language production. It was made in conjunction with director Kim Jee-woon’s own Grimm Pictures. His previous works include celebrated horror outing A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) and gangster movie A Bittersweet Life (2005), […]
Operation Chromite
by Jeremy Clarke. A new South Korean film tackles the story behind a major event in twentieth-century military history. Europeans and Americans are familiar with 1944’s D-Day landings, in which the Allied forces landed on the French coast to turn the tide of the war in their favour. The much less well-known battle of Incheon […]