The subtitle is moderately disingenuous—the first Korean movie I watched in a theater was Musa: The Warrior circa 2002 (good flick.). Since then, I’ve really only paid attention to the auteurs who got international acclaim (and then inconsistently), and a few of the blockbusters. The ideal audience for this is people who enjoyed some or all of Oldboy, Burning, and Parasite and want to know what else is out there and/or are too lazy to look up what’s on what streaming service. We’ll limit our scope here to movies since 2000 by living filmmakers (canny heads will recognize this as a way of getting out of having to talk about the late Kim Ki-duk.) The result is admittedly a deeply masculine list of films, great performances from the likes of Jeon Do-yeon and Kim Min-hee; hopefully this will be alleviated by the emergence of Kim Bora (whose work I haven’t seen) whenever I update this.
Bong Joon-ho
Key movies: Parasite (Hulu); The Host (Hulu); Mother (Hulu); Snowpiercer (Netflix)
Shaped by the student pro-democracy demonstrations of the late ’80s, Bong developed into a populist filmmaker whose signature is sudden tonal shifts. Early on his work was marked and arguably marred by a certain cynicism (especially in Memories of Murder); this was something he didn’t so much overcome as successfully integrate into his still rather broad satire. His action movies are as good as anyone’s made in recent decades, both for the action scenes themselves and for the sense that there’s more at stake than the fate of Seoul or humanity or Chris Evans. Mother is an all-round improvement on Memories of Murder even before it turns into a another movie for its final act. Parasite you know about.
Lee Chang-dong
Key movies: Burning (Prime/Hulu); Poetry (Kanopy); Oasis (Kanopy); Secret Sunshine (Criterion)
A playwright before being dragged into film, Lee’s an intellectual who’s tried to get along with the establishment, serving a term as Minister of Culture, which got him on a blacklist (along with all the other directors featured here, apart from the politically inscrutable Hong) when conservatives took power. He’s the most literary of Korean filmmakers, with Burning (which someone called movie of the decade a little while back) a Murakami-cum-Faulkner adaptation, and oh yeah, one that’s literally called Poetry. He’s also distinguished for creating interesting and distinctive roles for women, rare in Korean film, with the lead actresses of Oasis, Secret Sunshine, and Poetry winning every Korean acting award going. Perhaps only his endings, which sometimes resolve too much, stand between him and a place with the all-timers.
Park Chan-wook
Key movies: The Handmaiden (Prime); Oldboy
Thanks to his Tarantino-like command of stylish violence, he was the most accessible of Korea’s auteurs (at least until Bong got good with monsters) but there was always a question if he had any other point. While two entertaining entries in his Vengeance trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance, weren’t as good at drumming up sympathy for anyone, I’ll continue to rep for Oldboy as more than the greatest linear fight since level 8 of Streets of Rage, allowing genuine tragic catharsis whether or not you think Freud had a point. Still, his best movie is The Handmaiden, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith that’s not only clever but unexpectedly sensitive outside of the sex scenes.
Hong Sang-soo
Key movies: The Day He Arrives (Kanopy); Right Now, Wrong Then (Kanopy); Woman on the Beach (Mubi); Claire’s Camera (Kanopy)
Averaging over a movie a year since he hit his stride in the mid-2000s, Hong’s the Korean filmmaker closest to the post-French New Wave European art film tradition. I watched On the Beach at Night Alone without my partner, who then asked what it was about. Oh, the usual: movie person walks around an unfamiliar city, talking, eating, drinking, and then it all happens again. His trick is that while almost every shot is realist, they’re combined uncannily—sometimes in a subtle way, as in The Day He Arrives’s chronology-scrambling shot repetition, sometimes less so, as in Right Now, Wrong Then’s two timelines and their divergent outcomes of the directorial stand-in’s advances towards Kim Min-hee. Hong following this up by actually having an affair with Kim Min-hee is, again, very much in the European art film tradition.
Popular cinema
In the last few years Korean blockbusters (many of which are on the KoreaOnDemand streaming service, which I haven’t tried) have trended towards the global mean of CGI schlock, which has mostly been a shame. Still, the Choi Min-sik (Oldboy)-anchored The Admiral: Roaring Currents, Korea’s most successful movie by admissions, used computer graphics to augment traditional boat-movie effects to dramatic success. In addition to nationalism (always of interest to a student of nationalisms like myself), hit movies often have a strong economic populist streak. Veteran features an exceptionally hateable performance by Burning’s Yoo Ah-in as the sociopathic heir to a giant conglomerate set against righteous (if deeply unprofessional) cops. Finally ,the non-naval historical dramas can also be quite good: Masquerade, starring Lee Byung-hun as someone who looks exactly like Lee Byung-hun, might be the most well-made, but the melodrama and homoeroticism of King and the Clown might’ve been more societally valuable.