A creepy, gruesome, gorgeous and flabbergasting treatise on romantic obsession and violent, nasty male-female relationships.

| Original Score: B- | May 4, 2005

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 14, 2004

Spring, Summer fans should only have their appreciation of that film expanded by seeing this rougher take on similar themes.

| May 21, 2004

Beautiful, angry and sad, with a curious sick poetry, as if the Marquis de Sade had gone in for pastel landscapes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 31, 2003

There is little question that this is a serious work by an important director who has something new to say about how, in the flip-flop of courtship, we often reel in when we should be playing out.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 16, 2003

A gorgeous and grotesque Korean film by director Kim Ki-Duk, who seems torn by his artistic and exploitive impulses.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 3, 2003

Once [Kim] begins to overplay the shock tactics and bait-and-tackle metaphors, you may decide it's too high a price to pay for a shimmering picture postcard.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 23, 2002

Daring, mesmerizing and exceedingly hard to forget.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 23, 2002

As gory as the scenes of torture and self-mutilation may be, they are pitted against shimmering cinematography that lends the setting the ethereal beauty of an Asian landscape painting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 22, 2002

A potent allegorical love story.

Full Review | Aug 20, 2002

I don't think I've been as entranced and appalled by an Asian film since Shinya Tsukamoto's Iron Man.

Full Review | Aug 20, 2002

Its juxtaposition of overwrought existentialism and stomach-churning gore will have you forever on the verge of either cracking up or throwing up.

| Original Score: 29/100 | Aug 19, 2002

Kim Ki-Deok seems to have in mind an (emotionally at least) adolescent audience demanding regular shocks and bouts of barely defensible sexual violence to keep it interested.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2002

While The Isle is both preposterous and thoroughly misogynistic, its vistas are incredibly beautiful to look at.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 28, 2002