MikePadgett.com

• Director: Bong Joon Ho
• Korea, 2003
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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: David Fincher
• United States, 2007
• 

The identity of the perpetrator of five serial murders claimed by the so-called “Zodiac” killer remains a mystery. Inevitably the case has preoccupied the popular media, most famously in the analogy drawn by the “Scorpio” plotline in Dirty Harry. Newspaper cartoonist turned super sleuth Robert Graysmith documents the real-life hunt for Zodiac in his book, upon which Fincher’s weighty film is based.

This is David Fincher’s first feature since 2002’s flimsy Panic Room and he admits to having become as obsessed with the case as Graysmith. In the sustained intensity of the film, almost devoid of the director’s usual action and wrongfoot plotting, there’s ample evidence of that fact. A near-unbelievable volume of research went into the project, producing James Vanderbilt’s commendably sharp script and a unique visual aesthetic. Fincher is in this one up to his neck and though he sometimes struggles to bring together the vast array of factual data with the demands of melodrama and character development, the result is largely successful.

Zodiac is overlong and slightly overambitious. Jake Gyllenhaal tries hard to conjure nuance and depth out of a rather uninvolving portrayal of Graysmith. Elsewhere there are some superb acting performances, notably from Robert Downey Jr - perfectly cast as a drunk and dissolute hack - and a tour-de-force of understated resonance from Mark Ruffalo as the harried detective Toschi.

• Director: Harold Becker
• United States, 1989
• 

There are similarities between Sea of Love and Adrian Lyne’s marginally superior Fatal Attraction, in that both feature uniquely edgy female leads and leading men who lack self-control at crucial moments. In both movies, that lack of self-control is vital to the plot, yet only Pacino in Sea of Love is able to turn it into a character asset.

Pacino’s haggard detective has given twenty years’ service, his domestic stability and his sobriety to the police force when he falls for a murder suspect. The movie then plays out a pretty straightforward “is-she-isn’t-she” storyline with a side order of buddy cop congeniality provided by the ever-reliable John Goodman.

Whilst Ellen Barkin’s Helen cannot compete with the unnerving excellence of Glenn Close’s bunny boiler Alex Forrest - a true movie original - she does bring a streetwise roughness to the relationship which rubs up well against the detective’s barely hidden vulnerability.