MikePadgett.com

• Director: Bong Joon Ho
• Korea, 2003
• 

Korean cinema is alive and kicking, emboldened and naive like a headstrong teenager with something to prove. One driver is undoubtedly a gutsy brew of high melodrama and truthful acting. Another might be that uniquely Korean gift for all things epic: simple, emotive storytelling with a keen directing wit.

Song Kang Ho runs the whole gamut as a twitchy detective who finds a sort of nobility in Memories of Murder, elevated by the soul searching investigation of a series of killings. Together with out-of-towner Kim Sang Kyung, Song grinds painfully through crime scenes and suspect interviews, finding few clues yet finding himself. Based on a true story, the film plays it humble with excellent humour and fine performances but classic status seems assured within minutes.

Bong Joon Ho here deserves a place on the growing list of talented directors to emerge from the peninsula during the last decade. He deals sensitively with provocative content and provocatively with scenes of rural Korea: it’s a subtle, successful contrast like the perfect balance embodied in the national flag. This is a beautiful film about the preservation of humanity in the face of inhumanity and it’s a triumph of style and substance.

• Director: Robert Altman
• United States, 1970
• 

Altman proved with MASH that a messy film could still be a successful one. Production was problematic, 80% of the dialogue was improvised and analogies to the situation in Vietnam were considered highly unfavourable by the studio.

From the hubris of organic filmmaking that later became Altman’s trademark emerged a funny, humanistic story about the sometime bizarre coping strategies of a group of medical surgeons in the Korean War.

Many of the Altman quirks are there, including the zooming, the overlapping conversations and the ensemble casting, and the film feels unusually raw as if it’s been edited without much of a plan. We know sometimes that the recipe doesn’t quite come together (Dr T and the Women) but in MASH the concoction is successful without precedent.

• Director: Kim Ji Woon
• Korea, 2005
• 

When A Bittersweet Life was screened at Cannes, one journalist compared the film’s inscrutable lead Byung Hun Lee to the 70s Alain Delon.

As you watch the sartorially elegant Lee’s protagonist Sun Woo go about his business early doors in the movie, it’s hard to disagree. However, the chilled liquid of Sun Woo’s self-control starts to evaporate fast when the simple task of tailing the mafia boss’ latest squeeze gets out of hand and even running a classy mob hotel becomes a bloody affair. Fortunately, the dark red stuff just happens to set off nicely the black marble of the décor.

Here, Lee is anything but the charming soldier boy he played in JSA. He’s debonair, driven and when it comes to handling multiple stabbings and gunshot wounds, he’s tough as old boots. He just gets up and gets on with this very Korean ode to stylised violence.

• Director: Park Chan Wook
• Korea, 2000
• 

For those who argued that the North/South tensions depicted in Shiri(1999) took second place to a daft Bond-esque tech-fluff plot, JSA (Joint Security Area) succeeds in approaching the borderline. This hype enabled the movie to do brisk business when I was living in Korea.

For Park, who has since turned out some stunning - and subtler - essays in style, JSA was an opportunity to explore the sometimes bizarre realities of life at the DMZ.

The result is highly effective as classic Korean melodrama - Kang Ho Song shines again - but the bilingual scenes have all the truth of Cold War propaganda.

• Director: Kim Ki Duk
• Korea / Germany, 2003
• 

A tale of loss of innocence and redemption, a film with its own sense of inner peace.

Director Kim appears to ‘atone’ for the fatalism and violence of his earlier outings in the spare, delicate fable of Spring …, the story of a Buddhist monk told in the four symbolic seasons of his life.

Spring … seems to have its own life force, as if the film made itself - a feeling I had not experienced since I saw Oshima’s Gohatto. Effortlessly light, never ponderous and always beautiful, this film stays with you long after the curtain goes up.

• Director: Je Gyu Kang
• Korea, 2004
• 

An epic saga of two brothers caught up in the Korean War, this film demonstrates the Korean sensibility for well-crafted melodrama.

What’s unusual, however, is the sheer scale of the production. Taegukgi was the most expensive movie ever to come out of Korea and the mission, led by Shiri director Kang with his crack squad of filmmakers, is very much accomplished.

Comparisons with Saving Private Ryan are inevitable, with a human interest storyline and the similar use of flashback storytelling, bleached photography and handheld cameras. Nevertheless the Korean effort, made for just $3.5m, is visceral and more evenly paced, making it easier to forgive the occasional lapse into sentimental opera.