The Old Woman With the Knife: Stainless Steel Is Gray

One of the surprises of getting old is that you get hit with ailments for which you hadn't planned. For me, it's been creaky knee joints, acidic reflux, and high cholesterol. For Hornclaw (Lee Hye-yeong), the aging assassin in The Old Woman with the Knife, it's waning endurance, a shaky hand, and slower reflexes. I can do stretches, eat dinner earlier, and take a nightly dose of Atorvastatin. She's going to have to perservere with her grueling physical regimen and find a kind, widowed veterinarian (Nam Myung-ryul) to stitch her up should "accidents" occur. Gone are those days in which her younger self (Shin Si-ah) could singlehandedly take out 28 men with a knife. Now she's having to resort to guns and a Spiderman-style rope to eliminate a gang of enemies who lack her timetested expertise.

And so, the illusion continues. We can do anything we used to be able to do, if we try a little harder. In fact, we can even adopt a stray dog named Braveheart and forge new allegiances with the "pest control" agency's office manager Cho-yeop (Ok Ja-yeon) who's modeled her look after Bettie Page, if we're inclined as well. But we'll also have to confront our messy past. (Career choices do make a difference!) In Hornclaw's case, that means facing off with Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol), a bloodthirsty sadist who wants to unseat their shared agency's current queen. You see, many years ago, he had a nanny who... Oh, check out Min Kyu-dong's fun action pic and find out.

Walk Up: An Experienced Cast Takes It to the Next Level

What do you look for in a Hong Sang-soo film? Hypernaturalistic acting? Zigzaggy dialogue that feels wholly improvised? Art about artmaking that gets unapologetically meta? A short list of specific actors whom you recognize as auteurial go-tos? A barely veiled unflattering self-portrait of the prolific director himself? If these are your must-haves then Walk Up is a must-see. This episodic movie sketches the lives of the occupants of a duplex by way of a recipe with those exact ingredients.

As a cougar landlady with a predatory vibe, Lee Hye-yeong turns in an especially riveting performance. She's practically licking her chops as she courts a semi-retired film director (Kwon Hae-hyo) -- with whom she may have had an affair -- to be her new tenant; her disdain for his fretful daughter (Park Mi-so), an interior designer apprentice, is no less visible for being nonverbal. All three of these performers have been in a couple of Hong's previous films and their familiarity with his material shows.

Subtext is what makes Hong's movies work. Actors who realize it's not just a matter of delivering the lines in front of a camera that's unlikely to move and start playing the interior world hard, and piling on motives perhaps not in the script, and being in the scene to the max... these are the type of actors who elevate Hong's material to unexpected heights. Fellow Hong alums like Shin Seok-ho as a boytoy and Song Seon-mi as a floundering restauranteur understand the assignment too. When you're willing to commit fully, you'll creatively creatively thrive on camera in a Hong Sang-soo pic.

The Novelist's Film: Auteur Means Author

Considering how ubiquitous face masks were during the pandemic's early years, how strange that more movies don't reflect that reality. Were filmmakers afraid of normalizing masks or hoping they'd disappear or fearful a mask would date their movie. Well, their unaffected presence in Hong Sang-soo's The Novelist's Film makes this one feel both more real and more historic; his choice to shoot in black and white only furthers that time capsule aspect. And so because of the masks, The Novelist's Film doesn't feel dated. It feels honest, artsy and archival, a moving counterpoint to the head-in-the-sand approach employed by nearly every other filmmaker. In other ways, however, this flick is typical Hong Sang-soo: The action is grounded in awkward reunions, this time between a writer (Lee Hye-yeong) and a bookstore-owning friend (Seo Younghwa) then that same writer and a movie director (Kwon Hae-hyo)then the writer and a poet (Gi Ju-bong) who used to be a drinking buddy.

The film gets most engrossing once the writer meets a famous actress (Kim Min-hee) but Hong also keeps us engaged by repeatedly throwing in a third character: a sign-language student (Park Mi-so); a visiting cousin (Ha Seong-guk); a non-speaking little girl (Kim Si-ha) who stares through a window. Everything's made fascinating by the masks, too. Remember when we wore them below our chins to talk? or when we couldn't decide whether to wear them? or when we were the only ones wearing them in our group? or when we wore gloves? As a snapshot of history, Hong gets these details right. Eventually, things gets pretty meta, thanks to the entrance of a famous actress (Kim Min-hee). But from start to finish, The Novelist's Film an effective reminder that feature films can reflect life without ever pretending to be documentaries.

No Blood, No Tears: Raising a Fist for the Sisterhood

The world needs more movies about women who learn to fight back. Ones featuring ladies who bond while kicking butt are even better. So here's to Ryu Seung-wan's No Blood, No Tears, a jopok chick flick with female fists as capable of drawing blood as they are of being raised in sisterly solidarity. Admittedly, both lead women aren't natural born killers. That honor goes to a down-on-her-luck cabbie (the unstoppable Lee Hye-yeong) who's stuck between a rock and a hard place because her AWOL husband's left her in debt up to her ears. Attempting to stay straight, she's reluctant to pair up with a gangster's moll (Jeon Do-yeon) as a way to get out of her situation but desperate times call for desperate measures. And so, the two misfits pair up to outwit the syndicate, the police, and one decidedly misogynist boyfriend (Jeong Jae-yeong). Little do they know that they'll also have to contend with a trio of goofballs led by none other than the director's adorable brother Ryu Seung-beom. With as many fistfights as there are doublecrosses, No Blood, No Tears would've been noir of the highest order if Ryu had simply spent a little more on the soundtrack. (The score is awful.) It's a B-movie, that's a B+.