BFI introduction: A middle-class office worker takes a trip back to his rural hometown, where memories of his troubled past and an intimate encounter with a local schoolteacher stir up complex feelings. Kim Soo-yong’s magnum opus, Mist employs atmospheric cinematography to create a melancholy mood, while the natural chemistry between Shin Seong-il and Yoon Jeong-hee, who is best known internationally for her work in Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, heightens the drama’s emotional heft.
This film is part of the Al Pacino season at the Garden Cinema, and is also screening on Tuesday December 3rd. Full details here.
Time Out review: There's an obvious point of comparison here with imperial Rome's taste for recreational carnage and brutality, which is why Stone includes a lengthy clip from Ben-Hur in this gargantuan, gung-ho American footballfest. Also included: colour filters and transitions, split-screens, freeze frames, pictures-in-pictures, assorted film and video stocks, helicopter shots, cornball weather imagery, histrionic sound effects, HipHop, heavy metal, drugs, sex, gyrating cheerleaders, colliding jocks, onfield set-pieces, off field set-tos, an encyclopaedic deployment of genre stereotypes, and stars stars stars. You may, of course, take this as a recommendation. Supercilious Europeans who insist that Americans possess no sense of irony have spent too much time in the company of Oliver Stone films. Agreed, the director has other qualities: few film-makers could hope to martial this much information into two and a half hours (fewer would try), and his flair for representational overload in itself must make Stone one of the outstanding chroniclers of American cultural decadence. Whether simply parroting the world around him makes the resulting work any good, or enjoyable, is another matter. This one's a meathead burlesque.Nicholas Barber
BFI introduction: A border incident leaves North and South Korean soldiers wounded or
dead, prompting an investigation by a neutral officer. Based on Park
Sang-yeon’s novel DMZ and masterfully directed by Park Chan-wook, the
film alternates between light, airy flashbacks and heavy, claustrophobic
investigation scenes. Song Kang-ho and Lee Byung-hun are superb and the
film is now ranked as an essential entry in New Korean Cinema. Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: Geena Davis and her director-husband, Renny Harlin, crawled out from under the rubble of Cutthroat Island,
which at the time was reported to be the costliest flop in Hollywood
history, to make an even nastier action thriller, about a housewife with
amnesia who discovers she’s actually a trained government assassin (and
apparently takes her orders directly from La femme Nikita). Frankly, if I had to see either Harlin-Davis movie again, I’d opt for the klutzy unpleasantness of Cutthroat Island
over the efficient if equally stupid unpleasantness of this 1996
release, with its protracted torture sequences and its overall
celebration of pain and injury (“You’re gonna die screaming, and I’m
gonna watch”). Still, if you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Geena
Davis say “Suck my dick,” New Line probably deserves your money. Jonathan Rosenbaum