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100Oldboy is a powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare.
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100It's a movie of such jaw-dropping violence, wild improbability and dazzling style it overpowers all resistance.
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100Park's direction is flawless and Jung Jung-hoon's cinematography is stunning.
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100Startling and amazing -- a cinematic hammer to the skull.
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90Anguished, beautiful and desperately alive, Oldboy is a dazzling work of pop-culture artistry.
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90Whatever its oversteps and excesses (I do think Park ran a little amok with the computer gimcrackery), Oldboy has the bulldozing nerve and full-blooded passion of a classic.
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90It's a work of art for sure, but a sadistic one. Oldboy is one of the year's best; it just isn't for everyone. If you're still interested, go for it.
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88As always with Park Chanwook, you just hold on and let him rip.
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88This hunt for revenge is really a quest for self-discovery. The story, acting and brilliant directing elevate Oldboy into a human struggle to know yourself and your place in the universe, and to live with that sometimes terrible knowledge.
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88Once the picture gets into Hollywood's bloodstream, it could well prove to be as influential as John Woo's 1989 crime thriller, "The Killer."
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80This is absolutely not a film for all tastes, but it's a masterpiece of pitiless power whose audacious, ambiguous climax strikes a note of insane romanticism as haunting as it is perverse.
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80The result is a powerfully visceral experience that justifies itself almost entirely on surface chops, with striking color composition and a complex sound design that elevates the story to an operatic scale.
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80Obviously, this sort of taboo-flouting imagery isn't for everyone, but Park's vision is all of a piece.
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80A wild, intensely cinematic ride into two men's burning desire to get even.
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80His film is not for the weak of stomach or heart, but it's a stunner all the same.
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80You will surely leave this movie shocked, shaken and surprisingly moved. And definitely stuck on that poor octopus.
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80Its magnificence is that it takes itself dead serious. It's not entertainment, but it's sure a piece of toughness.
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78While the climax is admittedly something of a letdown after all the build-up, it's a hopelessly, helplessly original film, all guts, no glory.
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75As mysterious as it is sinister.
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75This nightmarish revenge drama from Korea is grueling, intense, cruel -- the very definition of extreme cinema.
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75More than anything else, Oldboy recalls Alfred Hitchcock with all restraint tossed to the wind, or Hitchcock's most obsessed devotee, Brian De Palma, at his most nastily inspired.
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75Regardless of how you look at Oldboy, it's unlike anything you are likely to have seen before.
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75This is a movie about draining, tenderizing and chopping up the audience emotionally.
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70It says something when you come out of a film as weird and fantastical as Oldboy and feel that you've experienced something truly authentic. I just don't know what. I can't think of anything to compare it to.
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67It's just the kind of film that you'd expect a jury led by Quentin Tarantino to choose, a bloody and brutal revenge film immersed in madness and directed with operatic intensity.
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60Oldboy has the fatal air of wanting so desperately to be a cult movie that it forgets to present itself as a coherent one.
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50Despite its director's skill at staging trash with dash, Oldboy is too long and portentous to be an enjoyable B movie. The movie's self-seriousness short-circuits its sensationalism.
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50Oldboy caused a love-it-or-hate-it stir at Cannes last year, and how could it not: It's an onslaught made to cause a sensation. Consider me simultaneously jolted and depressed.
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50Entertaining to watch - notwithstanding the scene in which Dae-su eats a live animal - which is a good thing, because there is not much to think about here, outside of the choreographed mayhem.
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40There's a lot less here than meets the eye.
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10Put simply, in my humble opinion, Oldboy sucks.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 75 out of 82
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Mixed: 2 out of 82
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Negative: 5 out of 82