Going in a completely different direction is Oldboy, part two of Chan-Wook Park's revenge trilogy, consisting of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. This was the best received of the three, winning the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes and wooing American splatter king Quentin Tarantino to its cause. It's the quintessential revenge flick, a genre in and of itself in Korea nowadays, in which the Dae-su Oh is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years and then released and given 5 days to discover who did it. The shear monogatari anime series order animal rage that Park manages to capture in his characters, such raw emotion makes this one of the greatest films to come out of Korea period. Unfortunately his other two piece to the trilogy, while carefully crafted and amazingly filmed, fall short in terms of strength and power of story.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring - Another of Kim Ki-Duk's films, this tale of a young Buddhist monk raised on an island in a lake finding sexual awakening in the arrival of a sick young woman in need of healing, follows his fall from grace and return to the lake to heal his own spirit. It's a powerful film, beautifully shot, like any of Kim Ki-Duk's films, and also like those films is sparse in dialogue or action. But the subtlety that he masters in each and ever scene makes his films that much more powerful. Some might find them boring, but the key to his films is not listening or watching, but really becoming part of it and observing to the point of living along with the characters. And his characters force that reaction. The feeling that you're somehow entwined with their fate.