Like Michael Tolkin’s end-times melodrama The Rapture, this is a disquietingly ambiguous take on piety.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 24, 2023

The cinematic equivalent of prose that is clear, elegant and lyrical.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 22, 2010

Buried in the year-end rush but one of the year's best films.

| Dec 21, 2010

Secret Sunshine is a frequently beautiful film with a cold, dark heart.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Dec 21, 2010

An exemplary examination of coping that expands to entail questions of morality, absolution and faith.

| Original Score: A- | Dec 5, 2010

This exploration of grief in contemporary South Korea plods along adequately and intelligently.

| Oct 20, 2007

Lee has a rare gift for depicting how the minor dissonance of everyday interactions eventually explodes into public displays of rage and despair.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 24, 2007

The film is brave and unsparing (as is Jeon's performance) and asks some challenging and disquieting questions...

| Sep 18, 2007

This fourth film from Lee Chang-dong, one of the leading lights in the new South Korean cinema, begins as a young widow moves to the small town of Milyang, where her late husband was born and where she plans to work as a piano teacher.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 6, 2007

Emotionally complex tale of a woman's confrontation with the worst of fates.

Full Review | May 25, 2007

An ambitious, almost novelistic pic by writer-helmer Lee Chang-dong that ultimately fails to dramatize its lead character's conflicts in cinematic terms.

| May 24, 2007