Actresses: The Factor of Six

Six real-life actresses are invited to a photo shoot for the cover of Vogue Korea. So... Paint on that jungle red nail polish and let the DIVA WARS begin! Well, kinda. More like, Lee Je-yong invites six real-life actresses to improvise a movie about six actresses (modeled after themselves) doing a photo shoot for Vogue. And most of the time, everyone plays pretty nicely. Which isn't to say that the resultant Actresses is without some display of leading lady ego conflict. Choi Ji-woo intentionally arrives late and wants her own dressing room with a masseuse; Go Hyun-jung gets drunk and lashes out at rival Choi; Yoon Yeo-jeong, the grande dame of them all, gossips endlessly, especially about her own insecurities about being invited to the shoot so late in the game. But overall this group of women is surprisingly civil. Repeatedly offered opportunities to create drama, they repeatedly choose to make nice and make friends.

Director Lee doesn't fight their collective impulse to bond but wisely shifts his objective, allowing the six women an extended, impromptu celebratory feast that has them meditating on the nature of celebrity, jealousy, and age over Craft Service snacks and Don Perignon champagne. Yoon (because of her years in the biz) gives the most nuanced and consistently ironic performance with her mixture of hauteur and insecurity while the quirky Kim Ok-bin, the youngest on set, steals focus with slyly complementary moments that convey the mind of an innocent trickster. Although Go seems most at ease with the setup —attributable to her work with Song Sang-soo, a filmmaker whose work feels largely improvisational — she takes a back seat during "table talk" while 50-something Lee Mi-sook comes to the fore.

The final actress in the group, Kim Min-hee, might be easily forgotten if it weren't for the individual photos sessions encapsulated within the film. With haute couture bunny ears and a cupcake topped by vanilla icing, Kim comes alive before the camera, once she's free from the competitive aspect organic to improvising among such a cast. Which isn't to say that she's not good in the group scenes. She simply chooses to play a chorus role: Watch her sitting quietly as the others ham it up and you'll see that she's actually grounding the action. Now that's one selfless actress!

Now and Forever: Love You to Death

Somebody help me. I've seen nearly all the good Korean movies on Netflix and Amazon Prime and I'm now stuck watching crap like director Kim Seong-jung's sappy romance about two terminally ill "beautiful people" who hide their fatal diagnoses from each other as the ultimate expression of their death-defying, tragic, self-sacrificing love. She's got a heart ailment. He's got a brain tumor. I've got a headache and gas. And the discomforts don't end there either.

Aside from her cardiopulmonary issues, Han Hye-won (Choi Ji-woo) has some mental deficiencies too -- so much so that for a good stretch of the movie, I assumed that she was in the Psych Ward, not the ICU. Choi clowns around -- giving sudden looks of total incomprehension then giggling inappropriately -- so often that you assume the doctors must periodically instruct her to stand on her head just to ensure she gets some blood to her brain. The drama, surrounding her constant "escapes" from the hospital, suggests a staff that thinks she's a desperate case. But since her best friend Soo-jin (Seo Yeong-hie) periodically takes Hye-won's medicine in the butt cheek, you wonder if the patient is just getting placebos in the end.

That Lee Min-su (Jo Han-seon) pursues her so arduously, intellectual lightweight that she is, isn't romantic so much as creepy. A self-styled ladykiller, he's apparently bedded so many independent women (all with abandonment issues) that his devotion to a half-wit feels a bit predatory. Here's a woman with only one real friend, a rarely visited father, half a brain and half a heart. Are those wedding bells he's hearing or the bells of bedlam? Is he in love or has he simply lost his mind?

Min-su's sidekick Kyung-min (Choi Seong-guk) is infinitely sweeter, if a bit of a dingdong. Falling in love with Soo-jin may be equally irrational but it's also pretty harmless and pretty amusing. You won't cry when the two best friends get together in Now and Forever but you won't vomit in your mouth either. Small victories!

Nowhere to Hide: Look at the Crime; Don't Attend to the Crime

Nowhere to Hide certainly looks good. It's got a grainy black-and-white prelude in which one high-energy police bust periodically freeze frames into Crayola-colored stills. It's got slow, arhythmic pans that slide across glass surfaces reflecting autumn leaves, street lights and garish neon. It's got one extended fight sequence shot in silhouette so that it looks like cool shadow puppetry. All of this is good. It's also got a villain (Ahn Sung-kee) who despite being a murderer doesn't seem to justify the extensive manhunt. It's got a main cop (Park Joong-hoon, a kind of poor man's Song Kang-ho) who's technique is limited to swagger, smile and run. The detective has an ineffective sidekick (Jang Dong-kun); the bad guy, a teary-eyed girlfriend (Choi Ji-woo). All of this is bad. Does it balance out in the end? I'd say Nowhere to Hide is the perfect party video; director Lee Myung-se's movie is the type you want playing on a wall at a nightclub or a rave, its periodically flashy visuals acting as conversation-starters and boredom-preventers. Minus the dialogue (and there isn't much, frankly), Nowhere to Hide is fit to be seen and danced to.