Hong Sangsoo

A collection of 30 posts

Strange Tales

2023 Spring Festival Compilation

As I put together last year, here is a collection of the reviews I wrote for InReview Online's coverage of various film festivals from around the world so far this year. Check out the rest of the festival coverage at the site, they've got a lot of great writers writing

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Hong Sangsoo

In Water (Hong Sangsoo, 2023)

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Walk Up (Hong Sangsoo, 2022)

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Hong Sangsoo

The Novelist's Film (Hong Sangsoo, 2022)

Hong Sangsoo

In Front of Your Face (Hong Sangsoo, 2021)

Hong Sangsoo’s latest feature, his second this year, is his first film not to feature actress Kim Minhee since 2016’s Yourself and Yours. Kim instead serves as Production Manager, and her sensibility seems to pervade the film, even if we can’t see her at work. Or rather,

Hong Sangsoo

Hotel by the River (Hong Sangsoo, 2018)

Sean Gilman: You and I both saw Hotel by the River not long after it premiered late last summer at the Locarno Film Festival. But while in recent years we’ve found it difficult to stop talking and writing about Hong Sangsoo, as far as I know, neither of us

Hong Sangsoo

List (Hong Sangsoo, 2011)

With a few days to spare after wrapping the production of In Another Country, Hong Sangsoo and some of his crew and actors hung around and made this short film, which he’d agreed to do as part of the funding for the feature. Being Hong Sangsoo, of course he

Hong Sangsoo

Grass (Hong Sangsoo, 2018)

Evan Morgan: Let’s start with the title. Hong arguably crafts the best titles of any filmmaker working today; something like On the Beach at Night Alone is tinged with mystery, poetical and allusive. Grass, on the other hand, sounds quite atypical: earthy, prosaic, direct. Critical writing on Hong often

Hong Sangsoo

The Day After (Hong Sangsoo, 2017)

“I think that I have no control over my destiny and that I don’t play the leading role in it. I think that I can die at any time, I am ready to accept it. I think everything is less serious than it seems. In fact, I think that

Hong Sangsoo

Our Sunhi (Hong Sangsoo, 2013)

The culmination of the Jung Yumi films, in which a young film student unsuccessfully navigates the attentions of several competing men, none of whom see her for who she actually is, blinded by their perceptions of her prettiness, her innocence, her artistic sense, and so on. This cycle began with

Hong Sangsoo

Hahaha (Hong Sangsoo, 2010)

Among the slightest of Hong Sangsoo’s films is this story about two men recalling their recent trips to a small town. The movie is narrated by each in turn, we see them in black and white still photos as they drink toasts between anecdotes. The twist is that they

Hong Sangsoo

Like You Know It All (Hong Sangsoo, 2009)

“Why don’t you admit you don’t know it all? It’s hard to get someone’s heart, right?” This was the first Hong Sangsoo movie I ever saw, at the Vancouver Film Festival in 2009, which is pretty much the ideal setting for a Hong movie about life

Hong Sangsoo

The Day He Arrives (Hong Sangsoo, 2011)

“Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.” For some reason, this final line from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket was stuck in my head while rewatching The Day He Arrives. There’s no apparent relation between the two, though I have been thinking

Hong Sangsoo

Night and Day (Hong Sangsoo, 2008)

The Hongian hero, not so young anymore, finds himself alone in Paris. A quick intertitle informs us that this man, Seongnam (played by Kim Youngho), was at a party with some exchange students where marijuana was being consumed. Someone ratted him out to the police (pot smoking being apparently a

Hong Sangsoo

Woman on the Beach (Hong Sangsoo, 2006)

Coming off of one of his more audacious experiments in repetition, Tale of Cinema, in which the first half of the movie turns out to be a movie the main characters of the second half are watching, Woman on the Beach feels like a step toward conventionality. The two-part form

Hong Sangsoo

Hong Sangsoo Capsule Reviews

On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002) — May 9, 2013 Is it the remembering of the story of the Turning Gate that leads to re-enacting it, and if so, is it remembering the whole first half of the film that leads to inverting it? What’s the relation

Hong Sangsoo

Tale of Cinema (Hong Sangsoo, 2005)

A depressed young man talks to himself, narrating his life as he meets up with his brother and then runs into an old classmate on the street. He meets her after she gets off work for dinner, which naturally enough becomes drinks instead. The two resolve to kill themselves, together,

Hong Sangsoo

Woman is the Future of Man (Hong Sangsoo, 2004)

After finding increasing warmth amidst narrative experimentation and a shearing away of formal adornment, with his fifth film Hong Sangsoo returns to the cruel satire of his debut. A bitter and cruel skewering of the pretensions, hypocrisies and stupid lusts of the modern man, the film is relentlessly bleak, offering

Hong Sangsoo

On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (Hong Sangsoo, 2002)

The best of Hong Sangsoo’s early films is this, his fourth feature. Following upon the great leap forward in narrative experimentation that was Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, with its bifurcated narrative of literal repetition and variation, Turning Gate takes a step toward the abstract. Again the narrative

Hong Sangsoo

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Hong Sangsoo, 2000)

Hong Sangsoo’s third feature and his first truly daring experiment in narrative shuffling. While each of the first two films were unconventional, splitting their stories in four and two halves, respectively, they still hewed to most of the basic rules of screenwriting coherence and causality: The Day a Pig

Hong Sangsoo

The Power of Kangwon Province (Hong Sangsoo, 1998)

Hong Sangsoo’s second feature is much more recognizably his work than his debut. He wrote the screenplay, as he will with all his subsequent films, but did not for The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well. Scenes are for the most part now filmed in static single takes

Hong Sangsoo

The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (Hong Sangsoo, 1996)

Hong Sangsoo’s debut is most strikingly different from his later work in its bleakness and formal conventionality[1]. He hasn’t adopted the zoom yet, nor is he rigidly adhering to the master shot aesthetic either: there are insert shots, over the shoulder perspectives, single dinner scenes cut into

Hong Sangsoo

Mysterious Object at Cannes: Claire’s Camera (Hong Sangsoo, 2017)

Claire’s Camera, barely over an hour long and shot in about a week at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, isn’t even the best Hong Sangsoo movie of the past year. That would be On the Beach at Night Alone. Nor is it likely to be the most

Hong Sangsoo

Between Work: A Conversation on Claire’s Camera and The Day After

Evan Morgan: The sun’s out, palm trees are in sight, and we’ve temporarily traded in soju for sancerre. Hong Sang-soo is en vacance again. I don’t know about you Sean, but I’m always happy to see Hong in the literally and figuratively breezy mode that he

Hong Sangsoo

Yourself and Yours (Hong Sangsoo, 2016)

Yourself and Yours isn’t the latest film from South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, that would be On the Beach at Night Alone, which premiered a few weeks ago at the Berlin Film Festival (where it picked up a Best Actress award). But, Yourself and Yours may still get a