Hot Blooded: Once Upon a Time in Korea: Vodka Wars

Middle management sucks. Per Cheon Myeong-Gwan's gorgeously shot gangster pic Hot Blooded, that maxim holds true in the mafia, too. Mid-level mobster/hotel-manager Hee-su (Jung Woo) is its shining example, a career thug so in debt from gambling that "once you're out, your organs are all mine" — according to his neighborhood loan shark (Yun Je-mun). But how can he break out on his own without losing the little rank he's attained? Is loyalty not worth a dime? Has he aged out of his own future? This movie's message seems to be that greed has really messed everything up! A valid point of view.

Which is why Hee-su decides to traffic in black market vodka. He sees hustling stolen booze as his big break, his final chance to make a name for himself in the port town of Kuam. And you know what? In a different movie, his chances might not be so iffy. Upper mobility in Hot Blooded, however, is going to require a complete lack of morals. This is soul-selling time! Can you be good and rich? Or more specifically, can you become rich and stay good? Rarely, my friend. Rarely.

In fact, what once was the American dream is now the Capitalist nightmare, an international phenomenon in which every transgression can be forgiven if you're making money hand over fist. Drugs, drink, gambling, prostitution, murder... everything is excusable. How you earn your bank is secondary to how much ends up in the kitty. It's a distasteful POV, despite its global sweep, and one which puts no value on a human life. Including that of a childhood friend (Ji Seung-hyeon). All that matters is glamorous independence. Today's reality acknowledges that money's a more effective shield than innocence. Perhap it always has been that way. As George Bernard Shaw once quipped: "Morals are a luxury of the rich."

The Puzzle: Video Diary of a Repressed Serial Killer

I don't know about you but if I were looking to hook up with someone for a one-night-stand and the moment I got to this stranger's place, an unseen voice started telling me where to go over a speaker system in moodily lit halls with video cameras overhead, I'd turn around and leave. I've never been that horny! Yet Jung Do-jon (Ji Seung-hyeon) doesn't heed such warnings. Missing his shallow wife and tween child (who are abroad longterm), he's tired of being the celibate square at the office so he's going to choose from a pretty strange menu at a pretty strange saloon that serves sex instead of shots. Unfortunately, the secret desire this club's drugged wine is going to expose is Jung's misogyny. Which leads to murder.

What follows is the cover-up that backfires (a.k.a. the movie). So is anyone really cheering on this killer, except maybe the enthusiastic readers of his bestselling novel? (He pens books on the side.) Don't we all want to see him go down? Or does writer-director Lim Jin-seung assume our sympathies are going to be with the lead actor simply because... he's hot? Is he suddenly noble because he's worried about the well-being of his wife and daughter? Lucky for him, he studies martial arts (on the side) so he's ready to take on his newfound enemies when they start coming out of the walls. He's well-trained to murder again and again. So what's the message here? The Puzzle is one weird-ass puzzle. And no amount of false endings — and this movie has a few — is going to change that.

The Swordsman: A Simple Slice of History

One of the advantages of writing a passable swordfighting screenplay is that you don't need to create a lot of dialogue. All you need to do is to set up some clang-worthy conflicts. In Choi Jae-hoon's historical drama The Swordsman, the taciturn title character (Jang Hyuk) has two good reasons to unsheath his prong-tipped blade: to defend his king (Jang Hyun-sung) and to rescue his daughter (Kim Hyun-soo). He's sadly less concerned with the fate of the common people or the staff at the local Buddhist temple. Partially blinded by stray metal shards that lodged in his eyes during one fateful duel, he's reluctant to get involved unless absolutely necessary. Although, after watching him slice-and-dice crowds of well-armed enemies (guns included), I question his reticence to support nobler causes. Is stopping slavery and sex trafficking honestly beneath his dignity?

And is his royal highness worth fighting for? The Swordsman doesn't make much of a case for the noblest of nobles. Loyalty for tradition's sake comes up short, even if this movie's bad guys are mostly distinguished by their hairdos: there's shaved head (Ji Geon-woo), teased punk bouffant (Ji Seung-hyeon); a braided mohawk (?), and Disney half-ponytail (Joe Taslim), their confident leader. The one time he gets mad is when someone messes with his Instagram model acupuncturist (Angelina Danilova). In this way only is The Swordsman ahead of its time.