Barking Dogs Never Bite: In the Beginning, There Was a Genius

Yun-ju (Lee Sung-jae) leads a cheerless life. His domineering, pregnant wife (Kim Ho-jeong) has him cracking walnuts on a whim and his teaching career looks bound for nowhere if he doesn't raise $10,000 fast as a bribe for his professorship. Save the pity party for someone else though because Yun-ju's way of dealing with the chip on his shoulder is to kill the yapping lapdogs in his apartment building. Once you've seen him off a beribboned terrier and a toy doberman, you're kind of glad that he's got it so bad. And anyway, someone else is in greater need of your sympathy. That's Hyeon-nam (Bae Dun-na), the management company's spacey bookkeeper who's on a mission to find the dog-killer and a purpose in life (with a gal pal played by Go Su-hee). Because this is a Bong Joon-ho film, the narrative ends up being much more than those two intertwining tales. There are also subplots involving an indiscriminate janitor who tells good ghost stories, a crazy old lady who dries radishes on the roof, and a homeless man whose bad luck ends up seeming to work in his favor. When you consider that Barking Dogs Never Bite is Bong's feature film debut, you realize that he hasn't got better with each successive movie. He's always been great. He's just been great in different ways.

Tube: Tanks

"You can tell everything about a man by his shoulders," pickpocket Kay (Bae Du-na) tells us about her not-so-secret crush, transit cop Jay (Kim Seok-hun). But if that's really the case, is there really any need to hear him (or anyone else with shoulders) speak? So much of the dialogue is dreadful in Tube that you wish director Baek Woon-hak had simply let the body parts do the talking themselves. If he had, this chase-and-shoot about a crazed killer (Park Sang-min) who holds a speeding subway's passengers hostage in the hopes of getting the oh-so-evil President to kill himself might have emerged as a flashy-if-frustrating art film instead of a clunky, high-budget upgrade of Speed as imagined by Michael Bay. (You've got to love the explosions!) Pure action pic lovers are unlikely to forgive the movie either, though because the gun fights are too one-sided and the fistfights are shot from too close. (You never get a good view of what's happening in either scenario.) Tube is really most effective as a promo for the Seoul Subway System. You'll spot none of the rats that are so ubiquitous in NYC and the high-ceilinged control center looks like something straight out of NASA.

Spring Bears Love: Why Do All the Mean Girls Get the Cute Guys?

Chalk up Yong Yi's romantic comedy Spring Bears Love as one of those exasperating no-good-ers in which an incredibly likable character courts a thoroughly detestable one. In the first column is Dong-ha (Kam Nam-jin). He's cute, goofy, devoted, upbeat, caring, and has a job! (He works as a train engineer.) In the second column is Hyun-jae (Bae Du-na) who's less cute, klutzy, morose, self-absorbed, and has a job a step down from his. (She's a checkout clerk at a supermarket.) So what's stopping Dong-ha from getting together with Hyun-jae? Well, she's improbably mooning over some unseen guy who's anonymously scribbling love notes in the library's coffee table books on Goya, Renoir and Caillebotte. It seems unlikely that this phantom scribbler is writing to her to be blunt but she's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and neither is Dong-ha. Because of that, there's a certain logic in the two dumbies reconciling themselves to each other at the end but what's illogical is why you'd want to follow this drawn out tale to its happy conclusion and you're bored response. A side story about Hyun-jae's kooky, hospitalized dad (Oh Kwang-rok) and the deaf-mute woman (Lee Hyeon-Kyeong) on whom he's developed a crush is the closest you'll come to escape.

The Host: Honey, I Lost the Kid... to a Mutant Monster

Government. Military. Big business. The medical establishment. The media. Which is the most inhumane, the most corrupt, the most evil? While The Host's central family unites to track down the aquatic Godzilla who's kidnapped their daughter (Ko Ah-sung), director Bong Joon-ho hilariously castigates the movie's true villains -- those power-crazed officials who keep getting in their way. Yet The Host is hardly some diatribe of antiestablishmentarianism; Bong is critical of his core characters, too: the slacker dad (Song Kang-ho), his self-defeating sister (Bae Du-na), his bossy brother (Park Hae-il) and the lovable grandfather (Byeon Hie-bong). Everyone does stupid things, no matter what your walk in life. To err is human. But what's also human are the brave, crazy acts that love can inspire us to. What elevates The Host from Kaiju camp to exceptional monster movie is how Bong uses familial love -- as opposed to romantic -- to propel his four squabbling yet noble family members to the very bowels of the Earth. You could say their rescue efforts fail but the final image of a re-configured family of survivors is nothing if not uplifting. Song's performance as the endearing doofus dad is frankly unforgettable.