- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
50Notorious on the festival circuit for its excruciating scenes of self-mutilation.
-
75This is the most gruesome and quease-inducing film you are likely to have seen. You may not even want to read the descriptions in this review. Yet it is also beautiful, angry and sad, with a curious sick poetry, as if the Marquis de Sade had gone in for pastel landscapes.
-
25South Korean melodrama uses a unique location, dominated by fishermen's floating huts, as the background for an overheated story that grows steadily more grotesque and unpleasant as it proceeds.
-
60Sadly, though, all this arthouse exploitation fails to reveal as much about contemporary Korea as, say, "Texas Chainsaw" did about the States.
-
60The increasingly creepy plot is counter balanced by a genuinely tender romance, which makes the film impossible to categorise, and will no doubt limit it to obscure arthouses and cinephiles who have very strong stomachs. They won't be disappointed.
-
50Eerie, opaque and unblinkingly sadomasochistic.
-
88Daring, mesmerizing and exceedingly hard to forget.
-
70At once predatory and vulnerable, Jung has a primitive intensity that speaks louder than words, carrying an enigmatic and often maddeningly elusive film that's short on dialogue, rational behavior, and narrative logic.
-
80A movie of extremes, and that goes for its aesthetics. As gory as the scenes of torture and self-mutilation may be, they are pitted against shimmering cinematography that lends the setting the ethereal beauty of an Asian landscape painting.
-
50The film nevertheless exerts a strange sort of power that makes for compelling viewing, even as its images force one to repeatedly look away.
-
80Kim's movie rocks -- I saw it cold a year ago, and I don't think I've been as entranced and appalled by an Asian film since Shinya Tsukamoto's "Iron Man."
-
"Spring, Summer" fans should only have their appreciation of that film expanded by seeing this rougher take on similar themes.