GENRE | Na Hong-jin Never Loses 'Hope' x TIFF 2026

"Bring forth true fate."

Neon / Elevation Pictures

South Korean genre director Na Hong-jin's new sci-fi alien action thriller, Hope, boasts the highest budget for a film ever from the East Asian nation while featuring some of the truly worst CGI seen in a major release in many years. It's difficult to describe just how electric the first hour is when audiences are dropped into the eponymous harbour town chasing monsters before the poorly rendered creatures are revealed.

CABLE | Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan Age Their 'Beef' – Netflix Season 2

"She has appalling taste in interior design!"

A24 Television

Back for another melodramatic spin at tormented domestic rivalries, season two of Beef's anthology series, created by Korean-American writer/producer Lee Sung Jin, takes a turn towards the affluent country club crowd in a personal feud between members of its staff, management, and new foreign ownership.

VIFF 2025 | Park Chan-wook Refuses to Make 'No Other Choice'

"There's nothing I won't do."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—No Other Choice (aka Eojjeolsugaeopda), acclaimed South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook's sharp economic thriller satire, uses the threat of murder as an amusing metaphor for how capitalist structures pit workers against each other. It's a stark but absurdist conception of a desperate future where the suburban family's dreams of an idyllic everyday existence are quickly fading away.

REEL | Top 10 Films of the 21st Century So Far

"We won't be like them."

Janus Films / Jet Tone Films

Click on each film title to read its corresponding review:

1) In the Mood for Love ¹ (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

2) Mulholland Drive ² (dir. David Lynch, 2001)

3) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. Michel Gondry, 2004)

4) Ghost World ³ (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

5) The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010)

SCREEN | A Queer Romantic Comedy of Errors – 'The Wedding Banquet'

"Queer theory takes the joy out of being gay!"

Bleecker Street / VVS Films

Thirty years later, Korean-American indie filmmaker Andrew Ahn remakes Ang Lee's seminal 1993 Taiwanese queer romantic comedy, The Wedding Banquet, into a fresh take on modern romance featuring a delightful cast of Asian actors. Shot in Vancouver but set in Seattle (because, of course), the film centers on two LGBTQ couples who, comically, try to solve each other's familial, financial, and romantic problems in the silliest ways possible.

SCREEN | Digitizing the Afterlife – 'Eternal You' x DOXA 2024

"It's able to hijack the things that we love the most."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck delve into the deeply troubling world of a "digital afterlife" created by artificial intelligence to extend the lives of deceased loved ones in Eternal You. This very real technology allows startups to effectively digitize those who have passed away by generating simulated versions of them in order to comfort grieving survivors.

SCREEN | Roaming 'A Great Divide' x VAFF 2023

"The poison was in their heart."

Vancouver Asian Film Festival

A Great Divide, helmed by Emmy-winning commercial director Jean Shim, making her feature debut, tackles anti-Asian racism in Middle America during the pandemic. When an affluent Korean-American family moves from the Bay Area to the rural plains of small-town Wyoming, they experience culture shock surrounded by less-than-welcoming neighbours.

SCREEN | Randall Park Goes Long on 'Shortcomings'

"Change is hard for assholes like us."

Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media

Comedian Randall Park makes his directorial debut behind the camera in the slacker comedy Shortcomings, about the Asian-American male gaze, based on the 2007 graphic novel of the same name by The New Yorker cartoonist Adrian Tomine, who also scripted the film adaptation. Its title is a reference to the limitations of both modern (interracial) dating culture as well as romance or relationships within one's own race.

SCREEN | Girls Trip to China – 'Joy Ride' Dares to be Raunchy

"I'm just a garbage American who only speaks English."

Lionsgate / Cineplex Pictures

Malaysian-American screenwriter Adele Lim makes her largely triumphant debut behind the camera in the generically titled but hilariously raunchy girls' trip comedy Joy Ride (originally titled Joy F*ck Club). Filmed entirely in the Metro Vancouver area, standing in (sometimes poorly) for Seattle, Beijing, Seoul, and Paris, the scattershot but appealing film focuses on its killer cast led by Asian-American women.

REEL | Greta Lee Revisits Her 'Past Lives' x SIFF 2023

"You make my world so much bigger and I'm wondering if I do the same for you."

Seattle International Film Festival

Past Lives, Korean-Canadian playwright turned filmmaker Celine Song's transcendent semi-autobiographical debut feature, inspired by her own experiences immigrating from Seoul to Toronto before settling in New York City, stars Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as childhood sweethearts, Na Young (Nora) and Hae Sung, who reunite as adults and contemplate their diverging directions in life and love. It's a stunning film about possibilities and reconciling your choices.

CABLE | Steven Yeun and Ali Wong Settle Their 'Beef' on Netflix

"Western therapy doesn't work on the Eastern minds."

A24 Television

Tuca & Bertie co-stars Steven Yeun and Ali Wong reteam for creator Lee Sung Jin's towering feud dark comedy series, Beef. Both leads are exceptionally dynamic, sizzling in their broad emotional range as dramatic performers. It's hard to telegraph where the strange action of the show is heading as Lee inserts a ton of situational surprises from episode to episode.

SCREEN | 'Return to Seoul' Searching x TIFF 2022

"Sorrow is the way of Korean men."

Toronto International Film Festival

Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou explores the internal complexities of foreign adoption in the splendid French-Korean drama Return to Seoul (aka Retour à Séoul or All the People I'll Never Be). It captures a surprisingly joyous and recklessly transformative journey of a young woman's diasporic anguish.

VIFF 2022 | Korean-Canadian Memories – 'Riceboy Sleeps' Well

"A man is only allowed to cry three times in his life."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2022—Sophomore filmmaker Anthony Shim writes and directs a beautifully touching Korean-Canadian mother-son family drama full of social realism inspired by his own childhood in Riceboy Sleeps. Set and shot mostly in the sleepy Vancouver suburbs (filmed in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows), we follow an immigrant single mother struggling to raise her young son with cultural pride while assimilating in 1990s Canada.

VIFF 2022 | Park Chan-wook Romances the 'Decision to Leave'

"Treat me like a suspect."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2022—South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook investigates at least one possible mariticide in his latest neo-noir mystery wrapped in a bittersweet detective romance. At first, Decision to Leave seems more concerned with mood than dramatic turns, yet there's a building sense of tension derived from its damaged characters.

CABLE | 'Pachinko' Spans Generations of Koreans in Japan on Apple TV+

"She will thrive."

Media Res

Based on Korean-American author Min Jin Lee's bestselling historical epic novel of the same name, Pachinko is a breathless adaptation celebrating the quiet multigenerational sacrifice of Korean women set against the backdrop of Japanese colonialism throughout the twentieth century.

REEL | Steven Yeun Finds His American Dream – 'Minari'

"Grandma smells like Korea."

A24 / Elevation Pictures

Korean-American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung (no relation) has made a startlingly moving and quietly emotional semi-autobiographical immigrant story set on a rural farm in 1980s Arkansas. Starring Steven Yeun (Chung's cousin by marriage) as a version of the writer/director's own farmer father, Minari tells a wondrously intimate tale of assimilating to the American Dream.

SCREEN | Seoul Searching – Finding 'Gyopo' x VAFF 2020

"Like how do I make you feel?"

Vancouver Asian Film Festival

Toronto video artist Samuel Kiehoon Lee has created a very creative and energetic portrait of young Korean foreign nationals (known as the gyopo diaspora), mostly artists, now living and loving in Seoul. Captured over a single day and night, the loose anthology of small character stories weaves in and out of the lives of various South Korean expatriates with a familiar artistry to its contemporary tales of lost identity.

GENRE | Bong Joon-ho Investigates the 'Memories of Murder'

"What kind of detective sleeps well?"

Neon / Elevation Pictures

Thanks to the improbable success of Parasite, South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho's acclaimed 2003 police drama Memories of Murder has been remastered and re-released for North American audiences. Partially based on Korea's first serial murders in history between 1986 and 1991 that went unsolved until last year, the crime procedural methodically dramatizes the step-by-step bungling of an entire investigation and dissects a small-town police force's inexperience in solving homicides.

SCREEN | Nick Kroll Follows His 'Olympic Dreams'

"You made me feel so warm."

IFC Films

Shot completely on location inside the Athletes Village without a crew during the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, married filmmaking couple Jeremy Teicher and Alexi Pappas have basically made a semi-improvised hangout movie set in an ultra-exclusive setting. With unprecedented access from the IOC through an artist-in-residence program, Olympic Dreams artfully captures the spirit and in-between moments of the games.

TREAT | New in Town x Mello Donut Shop x Chinatown

Chinatown—(January 12, 2020) The new and modern, Korean-owned Mello Donut Shop—from the same proprietor of the well-loved but short-lived Uyu Ice Cream shop, opened up next door to Umaluma Gelato at the tail end of last year, to an already exciting reception.