Escape from Mogadishu: North and South Alliances in Africa

Aside from BTS and Bong Joon-ho, most Americans probably don't consider South Korea a major player on the world stage. As for North Korea, they've been designated as a longshot threat run by an insane leader with a hot temper and nuclear weaponry. I don't know if such hierarchical political views of the earth do us well. We all occupy the same planet and wars between two nations can assume global importance soon enough. Israel and Palestine, anyone? In truth, the conflicts, genocides, uprisings and dictatorships concern us all. As Toni Morrison once put it: "The function of freedom is to free someone else." If we're not moved my the decimation in the Middle East, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Ukraine, how civilized are we really? And so, a movie like Escape from Mogadishu, about South and Korean diplomats working together to find safe harbor amid a civilian rebellion in Somalia has plenty to say about governance, negotiations, police brutality, children with guns...

As the South's Ambassador Han, Kim Yoon-seok is morally slippery but well-intentioned. His stoic ounterpart Ambassador Rim, Huh Joon-ho brings a respectfulness not always accorded the neighbors from the North. (Each has a hot-headed assistant played by Zo In-sung and Koo Kyo-hwan respectively.) Once the two sides team up (seeking assistance from Italy and Egypt, not the U.S. and China by the way), Ryu Seung-wan's historical drama really gets cooking. I don't know whether the fleeing Koreans really wrote blood types on their children's arms or bulletproofed their cars by duct-taping hardcover books on the hood but it sure leads to one of the most exhilarating getaways in recent memory. Which isn't to say the survivors have escaped everything. Not by a long shot. And that acknowledgment makes Escape from Mogadishu not just good but very good.

Sinkhole: The Kids Are Far From Alright

Kim Ji-hoon's Sinkhole is a disaster comedy with one serious problem: The script introduces two children among the various residents who live in a doomed tenement about to get swallowed up by the earth then, like the other characters sharing their subterranean fate, abandons the kids for too long. I, for one, spent a lot of time impatiently waiting for the building's super (Cha Seung-won), the newest tenant (Park Dong-won), and two housewarming guests (Lee Kwang-soo and Kim Hye-jun) to stop griping about cell phone service and mud-covered chicken and to start searching for the two forgotten young boys, trapped in the basement parking lot with a senile grandma.

And unlike this director's previous — and highly gratifying — disaster pic The Tower, Sinkhole in undermined by jokes that never click, a love story that feels contrived, and muted tension buried under terrible CGI. Also, I realize that you have to cheat a little with lighting in a movie in which a half-dozen people find themselves submerged, miles below the earth's surface as few sun rays or moonbeams would reach them. But do you have to have your imperiled survivors scrambling around on what looks to be a multi-story stage-set? In which case... "Curtains!"

Past Lives: Seeing Yourself on Screen

Much is made of representation in the media for gays, women, POC, et cetera but you don't hear about it so much when it comes to interracial couples. And it's not like I can't think of examples in film: Anna Deavere Smith and Bill Irwin in Rachel Getting Married; Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. Neither of those movies explored the relationships in racial terms, however. The ones that do — Loving, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — often do so to the exclusion of everything else. Which makes Past Lives something special. For while the relationship between playwright Nora (Greta Lee) and her husband Arthur (John Magaro) isn't the central story, writer-director Celine Song does take the time to show the frictional sparks, related to the cultural divide as experienced by this married couple.

But Past Lives is much more than that. Something akin to a parable about what happens when your childhood crush (Teo Yoo) reappears in your life not once (digitally) but twice (the latter, in person). As you might guess, the results are poignant, passionate, and ultimately painful. For confronting the past (which inevitably contains the dreams of youth, and a look at our earlier, less corrupted selves) isn't easy. Any adult, whose done the internal work, isn't going to throw everything over to try to recapture what never came to be. But there's a cost that comes with this maturity, one which Past Lives details exquisitely.

Indian Pink: Bloodstains on Your Collar

It's not hard to tell something's up with unscrupulous businessman Dong Seok (Kim Hyun-joong) early on in Indian Pink. He's irritable on the phone with his best friend; he squeezes a glass shard until his hand draws blood. Then in case we haven't figured it out, he unsuccessfully drowns his sorrows in drink. What follows, for the first third at least, is really a one-man show, a monologue (with phone calls) masquerading as a movie, a nightmarish mishmash of regret — nay, remorse — for a tragic action that only the slowest of filmgoers won't figure out. Even the false, fantasized memories that constitute the flashback in the second act are easy to dispel, in part because ex-girlfriend is not particularly believable. Perhaps that's intentional?

Once all the cards are laid on the table, writer-director Kim Seewoo doesn't have that much more to explore. Nefarious business deals still get made; a friend/associate becomes complicit in the crime; suicides are attempted and aborted; bodies must be disposed of; and our villainous protagonist is already on the hunt for a new girlfriend. So why does Kim Seewoo's psychodrama feel more lukewarm than chilling? Despite all the bloodstains on white linen in Indian Pink, this flick doesn't make much of a mark.

Deadly Kick: No Good Ninja Goes Unpunished

The best parts of director Ko Young-nam's and star Lieh Lo's martial-arts pulp-pic Deadly Kick are definitely when it gets strange: the scenes in which the anti-hero channels/hallucinates animals during battle; the plucking out of eyeballs or intestines; the blind woman's fight-training sequence replete with superhero uniform and a girl with directional sleigh-bells. In the long stretches between those bits of weirdness, the movie leaves us with little: a pair of overactive eyebrows and absurd moments like when one guy holds a pair of panties to his nose then comments "smells better than whiskey."

Outside of that, the action — which ranges from convoluted syndicate machinations to drunken nipple-nibbling — is infrequently amusing, frequently preposterous. What should make for drama, does not. Take the film's airborne assassins who can't quite hit the one moving car with their machine gun or their hand grenades. Not even when the car runs out of gas. Not even when its passengers are on foot. Because then helicopter runs out of gas, too. And if the movie itself isn't quite a gas, what it does have is one delicious fake mustache (on Bobby Kim, once known as the "Oriental Charles Bronson") and a couple of "school project" torture devices. At least, it's set in the '70s so there are aviator sunglasses for everyone!