Mickey 17 (2025)

Bong Joon-Ho's Mickey 17 is a messy overreaching film about an "expendable", a worker on a spaceship who is employed to die over and over (with a new self 3D-printed after each death); it's a childish pantomine of conflated woke themes presented plainly - a rehash of ideas from Okja and Snowpiercer - with Toni Collete stepping in for Tilda Swinton, and Mark Ruffalo arrived directly from the set of Poor Thing.

★★★☆☆

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Parasite (Gisaengchung) (기생충) (2019)

Like the Shoplifters, the parasites are members of a family trying through criminal means to overcome their bleak social circumstances - here, under false pretenses they inveigle their way one by one into jobs in an upperclass family home - and it's once they are ensconsed that director Bong Joon-ho lets all hell run loose - you won't believe a lot of what comes - but the director's shifts between absurdist black comedy, freak show horror, family drama, crime thriller and social commentary are more awkward here than in his other work, and even though there is a sting in the tail - a decidedly grim punchline that makes you forgive the absurdities of the preceding plot by asking you to consider the alternative - the movie needs a further hour's runtime to make everything fit neatly and to deal with several plot threads simply left dangling.

★★★★☆

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Snowpiercer (2013)

In Director Bong Joon-ho's first English language cinema release - a sci-fi action movie set entirely within the confines of a futuristic train - absurdity and solemnity, lofty pretentions and humour mix in a way only Bong Joon-ho can successfully manage; the result, a story of an uprising in segregated communities of haves and havenots, is a ridiculous and audacious, enthralling and hilarious political allegory.

★★★★☆

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Memories of Murder (살인의 추억) (2003)

Only South Korea's Bong Joon-ho could produce from such grim true-life serial killer events this terrifically heady mix of human absurdist farce, police procedural thrills, mystery, and tragicomedy.

★★★★★

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Mother (마더) (2009)

This is another distinctive Bong Joon-ho movie combining family drama, Hitchcockian thrills and twists, and absurdist comedy in a richly detailed story of an ageing mother who during a police investigation into a shocking crime remains determined to protect the interests of her adult son with an intellectual disability.

★★★★☆

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