A Traveler’s Needs feels like an experiment whose results are more intriguing than worth publishing.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 7, 2025

As the film is so intensely aware of Huppert’s presence and the charisma she carries, there’s a magical weight to her blankness, her unexplained idiosyncrasies.

| Dec 11, 2024

Its rhythms are patient, easing you into one subtly profound moment of everyday human connection after another.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 22, 2024

There is just enough intrigue this time to suggest hidden depths.

| Nov 21, 2024

A beguiling Isabelle Huppert anchors the best (and funniest) Hong Sang-soo film in several years. Long may this exciting yet bizarre actor-director collaboration continue.

| Original Score: B+ | Nov 21, 2024

You can spend the entire film wondering if you have properly understood the joke, or if it is a joke. But it is hypnotically watchable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 10, 2024

Huppert plays a French woman in Seoul, looking for a means to make a living. She seems to appear out of thin air, perfectly formed, sitting on a park bench, looking around her as if she’s always been there.

| Feb 27, 2024

This represents a bit of an adventure for Hong beyond his usual milieu. That said, this is still profoundly slight stuff, thin and ineffable as mist...

| Feb 22, 2024

here the humour perhaps asks the viewer to not take the action too seriously, it’s also a perceptive film about the performative coping strategies of a stranger in a strange land.

| Feb 20, 2024

But it’s Huppert who is especially sensational, blending a deft sense of innocence with a hint of mischievousness

| Feb 20, 2024

Manifestly Hong in every shot – which of his films is not? – but it is also one of his more enigmatic and alluring works.

| Feb 20, 2024

If Huppert’s endearingly scatty, offhand performance lends proceedings a veil of comfy familiarity... “A Traveler’s Needs” nonetheless finds the indefatigable Korean auteur at his most puckishly cryptic.

| Feb 20, 2024