News

The mystery thriller will star Tang Wei and Park Hae-il.

South Korea’s Cj Entertainment has announced that The Handmaiden director Park Chan-wook is set to start shooting his latest feature this month.

The film, which is titled Decision To Leave, will star Tang Wei and Park Hae-il (The Host), alongside Lee Jung-hyun (Peninsula), Go Kyoung-pyo (Seven Years Of Night) and Park Yong-woo (Spiritwalker).

It’s the first feature film directed by Park since his 2016 Cannes Competition title The Handmaiden. His most recent project as a director was the Bafta-winning TV series The Little Drummer Girl (2018), an Ink Factory production for the BBC and AMC.

The 17th edition of the Florence Korea Film Fest is opening its doors to the public. The festival dedicate to the South-Korean cinematography will be held from March 21st to to the 28th at Cinema La Compagnia in Firenze, Italy.

As explained by the Festival organisers: “The aim of the Florence Korea Film Fest, is to promote the seductive Korean cultural universe through the magnifying glass of the big screen, art exhibitions and conferences”.

Unique in its kind throughout Italy, the Festival, offers premieres and contemporary classics, documentaries, short films, and extensive retrospectives of the leading directors of Korean cinema, often with the participation of the authors themselves.

The 17th edition of the Festival will present 45 titles, between shorts and feature films, most of them in Italian and European premieres.

Jung Woo Sung, one of most beloved performers in his country (and also in Japan) will be honored by a...

Police procedural comedies are more often than not a fun ride. The latest to tackle the genre is director Lee Byung-heon with his new film “Extreme Job”.

Synopsis

A drug squad consists of 5 detectives: Detective Squad Chief Go, Detective Jang, Detective Ma, Detective Young-Ho and Detective Jae-Hoon. The team attempts to take down a criminal organization and they must go undercover to do so. The detectives begin work as employees at a chicken restaurant across the road, but the chicken restaurant becomes famous for its delicious chicken. Due to the restaurant’s unexpected popularity, the detectives find themselves in a situation they never expected.

Director Lee Byung-heon is no stranger to comedy, with his previous two films “Twenty” and this year’s sleeper hit “What A Man Wants” both being well-received, as well as having written the screenplays for “Scandal Makers” and “Love Forecast”.

Starring as Chief Go a leaner,...

Following on the success of his earlier period drama, director Choo Chang-min finally returns to the director’s chair after several years of hiatus to provide his own take on the most popular form of South Korean cinema, the revenge thriller. Taking his own spin on the material, adapted from the novel originally written by Jung Yoo-jung, the film misses more often than not, but still retains enough to really like.

Seven Years of Night is screening at London Korean Film Festival

Moving to a remote village, security guard Choi Hyun-su relocates his family after finding the area too expensive for them to live, eventually finding a place on the outskirts of town. While driving home one night, he inadvertently hits and kills the daughter of the wealthy dentist and landowner Oh Seung-je, who goes into a rage at the man, despite being physically and emotionally abusive towards her in the first place.

Renowned genre director Park Chan-wook’s brutal, bloody 2003 Oldboy notoriously set the bar among South Korean revenge thrillers so high that more than a dozen years later similar films are inevitably measured against that standard. Seven Years of Night, adapted from Jeong You-jeong’s best-selling novel, represents another attempt among many others that falls short by comparison, burdened with a convoluted script and inconsistent performances.

Every revenge story needs at least one clearly defined tragedy as a foundation -- writer-director Choo Chang-min’s fifth feature has two, one for each of the guilt-ridden fathers at the center of the film.

Choi Hyun-su...

Local horror thriller, “Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum” landed on top of the South Korean box office. Since opening on Wednesday, the Showbox release earned $10.2 million from 1.37 million admissions, including $492,000 earned from previews. It accounted for 40% of the total weekend box office.

Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” could only manage second place. Also opening on Wednesday, the Warner Bros. release earned $8.09 million, accounting for 33% of the weekend box office revenue.

Fantasy romance, “Be with You” slipped to third from the previous week’s second. The Lotte Entertainment release earned $1.98 million between Friday and Sunday and extended its total to $17.6 million after three weekends.

Another Wednesday opener, “Seven Years of Night” took fourth place. Released by Cj Entertainment and directed by “Masquerade” director Choo Chang-min, the Korean thriller drama earned $2.99 million over five days. Based on Jung Yoo-jung’s novel of the same title, “Seven Years” sees the story of a man...

"The death triggers the devil within..." Cj Entertainment from Korea has released a new official Us trailer for a Korean thriller titled Seven Years of Night, directed by Choo Chang-min, slated for release in early April in just a few weeks. The dark crime film tells the story of a man plotting a revenge, over a period of seven years, against the son of his daughter's murderer in a hit-and-run accident by a lake. The tagline from the poster is pretty slick - "there's something that never sinks" - which imagines up all kinds of intriguing possibilities, and fits with the emotional story. "The long nightfall of rage and revenge." The cast of Seven Years of Night includes Ryu Seung-ryong, Jang Dong-gun, Song Sae-byuk, Ko Gyoung-pyo, and Jeong Hee Moon. This reminds me a bit of Park Chan-wook's early films, like Oldboy and Mr. Vengeance, which give the characters copious...