Little Forest: And Then She Cooked

Creators who think there is one right way of doing things aren't creators at all. They're low-ranking soldiers and well-behaved clerks who happen to work in art. So here's to director Yim Soon-rye and his Little Forest, a fascinating little film about a 20-something who retreats home after failing to make it in the big city. Seeking conflict? There aren't any major confrontations between the characters. How about romance? No sparks fly between the ingenue (Kim Tae-ri) and either of her friends from high school — a young man (Ryu Jun-yeol) and a young woman (Jin Ki-joo) who don't have any chemistry between them either. Crackling dialogue? Actually, the best parts of Little Forest are the endless shots of food being prepared with allusive voiceover. And yet, despite all these "shortcomings," Little Forest is a movie that definitely works.

You'd be surprised how much can be conveyed by drying persimmons and frying cabbage pancakes and hand-delivering creme brulee. The long stretches of narration (which one can easily imagine being written off as "too talky" in a screenwriting class) inform us that our heroine's passion for cooking has been inherited from her mom (Moon So-ri), a single parent who wasn't always there when she was needed but maybe was there for her daughter enough. And as art goes, it's more than enough. It's delicious.

Night in Paradise: The Writer's Gang

One of the advantages of having the screenwriter direct is you will avoid unnecessary improvements to the script such as having the male and female leads tongue or having the good guy emerge complete victor whatever the odds. Park Hoon-jung (I Saw the Devil, The Witch - Part 1) is a master of subverting formula in genre films. Here he's taken a classic jopok scenario — the little guy against the mob — and given it plenty of satisfying twists and turns involving a terminally ill sharpshooter (Jeon Yeo-bin) who never so much as kisses the underdog thug (Eom Tae-goo) who finds himself fighting not one gang, but two.

What he's got is character-driven tension. As for the fight scenes, they're brutal in a way that's strangely pretty. Consider the hero's face which, though covered in blood, has the whitest full-toothed smile possible. Yet if you fault Night in Paradise for not being gritty enough, you'd be overlooking its many pleasures — its thrilling propulsion, its innate sense of justice, its upholding of a Korean cinematic tradition that insists that women are bad-asses, too. Throw in strong performances from Lee Moon-sik as a cop with a shit-eating grin and Hyun Bong-sik as a gun-seller who a single stab can't kill and you've got the makings for some pleasurable pulp. It may not be a brilliant movie but flicks like this are why I started Korean Grindhouse in the first place. Mad respect.

Insane: Burning up the Madhouse

The problem with plot twists at the end of the movie where they show footage of what actually took place at a crucial moment is it throws into question everything that happened beforehand. Must we trust the new scene without question? Are there other scenes that also didn't unfold as previously shown? Throw into the mix that Insane's female lead (Kang Ye-won) was kidnapped to a psych ward where she was tortured by a diabolical doctor (Kim Jong-soo) who harvested his other victims for their black market organs and you realize how slippery the truth is destined to be. Are we really expected to believe that a discredited reporter seeking fame is our most reliable source?

So Insane is insane and inane; Lee Cheol-ha's maddening whodunit Is also a whodunwhat as we struggle to figure out exactly what crimes were committed first then figure out who is responsible for each one. Arson. Murder. Abduction. Torture. Dirty medicine. Shady journalism. Castration. You'd assume with that last one I'd know who the culprit was but I don't feel confident that I do. And I did see who the victim was! But was it a trick castration? Or should we write that grisly crime off like the woman who claimed her uterus was messed up by vaseline? I'll leave solving this puzzle to someone else.