Earlier this year a movie was released and forgotten in such quick succession there’s a strong chance you didn’t know it existed. That’s fine, I almost missed it myself, except for one thing: I was looking for it. Why? It was directed by the great and lively Kim Jee-woon, the least celebrated of the big three South Korean genre directors who became popular midnight movie fixtures in America in the ’00s. His movies have been released to increasingly little fanfare, and to my knowledge, his TV series “Dr. Brain” went completely unacknowledged by Western critics (tragically, its star Lee Sun-Kyun, also of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Hong Sang-soo’s Oki’s Movie, passed away last year).
His movies “The Foul King,” “A Tale of Two Sisters,” “A Bittersweet Life,” and “I Saw the Devil” put him on the map. He’s yet to produce anything since that has had the same reputation to the point where his most personal film, the film set comedy “Cobweb,” vanished without a trace. I like Kim’s movies now (especially his 2016 spy yarn “Age of Shadows”) better than ever, and here’s why, and why I still look forward to his every new movie, with a quick sojourn into the history of South Korean cinema that affected him and his peers.
