MikePadgett.com

• 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.