Shim Eun-ha and Lee Sung-jae star as odd-couple roommates who find themselves living out the film script they are collaborating on in this charmingly inventive meta-movie romantic comedy, which delivers its genre pleasures with a knowing wink.

A blast of careening, nihilistic craziness, this gonzo anarcho-comedy unfolds over the course of one wild night as a band of four disaffected young men hold a gas station hostage and unleash increasingly mass-scale chaos.

Bong’s brilliantly cracked first feature, charting the hilariously warped chain of events that follow in the wake of a dog’s death, displays the audacious blending of genres and tones that would soon put him at the forefront of Korean cinema.

Unexpected romance blossoms for a terminally ill man in this modern Korean classic, a poignant reflection on the ephemeral nature of life and love that derives its power from a supreme delicacy and restraint.

The acclaimed feature debut of Hong Sang-soo displays his master’s touch in its unsparing look at the complexities of love as it traces the tragic ripple effects that emanate out from an extramarital affair.

A young man’s descent into a life of crime unfolds in four, stylistically distinct chapters—from raw documentary realism to action-drama to horror-thriller—in this gritty indie cult hit, a furious, innovative study of male rage taken to its toxic extreme.

The great Song Kang-ho delivers a deft tragicomic performance as a timid bank clerk who transforms himself into a masked professional wrestling hero in this lovably goofy sports comedy and character study.

An art professor finds himself at the center of a haunted love triangle in this deliriously surreal, strangely poignant tale of obsessive love from beyond the grave, one of the first homegrown blockbuster hits produced by the modern Korean film industry.

A box-office record-breaker in South Korea, Park Chan-wook’s third feature is both a Rashomon-like murder mystery and a tender, hauntingly humanist male melodrama rooted in the trauma of 20th century Korean history.

Based on the true story of South Korea’s first serial killer, Bong Joon Ho’s masterful, gonzo comic take on the police procedural eschews crime thriller conventions in favor of a haunting, richly human exploration of failure and existential futility.

A box office sensation across East Asia, this irresistible romantic comedy mixes goofball humor and heart-tugging melodrama as it traces the wild-ride relationship that develops between a mild-mannered guy and a brash, troublemaking girl.

Han Suk-kyu stars as a career gangster who sets out to climb the ranks of organized crime in this wildly inventive blend of dark comedy, outrageously over-the-top violence, and millennial doomsday anxiety.

A pulp policier done up in shoot-the-works avant-garde style, this hallucinatory thriller incorporates elements of film noir, silent cinema, slapstick comedy, and Hong Kong action cinema as it follows a pair of dogged detectives on a grueling 72-day manhunt.

An international sensation since its rapturous reception at Cannes, the second installment in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy is an operatically violent and morbidly funny tale of Kafkaesque revenge that has assumed the stature of a modern-day Greek tragedy.

As the bodies pile up, so do the laughs in this Evil Dead–style blend of macabre shocks and absurdist humor in which a family running a mountain inn has a serious problem on its hands when the guests all meet similarly grisly fates.

Deliverance-style, backwoods horror gets a Korean makeover in this rarely seen gem from the late nineties, a compelling genre work that comments on the hypocrisy and savage violence that lurk inside ordinary men.

Blurring the lines between cinema, virtual reality, and choose-your-own-adventure thrill ride, this postmodern, mind-warp techno-fantasy comes perhaps as close as film has to replicating the labyrinthine logic of a video game.

A hyperactive jolt of anarchic adrenaline, this mind-bending mash-up of sci-fi, horror, and psychological drama plunges headlong into the mind of a possibly deranged young man who believes he must save the world from an alien invasion—with alternately shocking and heartrending results.

Revenge is a vicious, nihilistic circle in the jolting first film in Park Chan-wook’s acclaimed Vengeance Trilogy, a blood-spattered moral tale with a nuanced philosophical underpinning.

Bae Doona stars in this affectingly naturalistic portrait of five young women navigating the uncertainties of early adulthood, an eloquent, quietly revelatory exploration of friendship, alienation, and economic anxiety at the dawn of the 21st century.

Transposing the French classic Les Liaisons dangereuses to late 18th-century Korea, this luxuriant saga of boudoir intrigue is a deliciously entertaining study of cruelty, pleasure, and erotic gamesmanship.