After barely surviving a mandatory shutdown in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, the executive class running some of the largest film studios in the world decided that they weren’t quite ridiculously rich enough yet and furthermore they hadn’t taken enough liberties – financial, creative and moral – with those employed by them.

And so the actors and writers collectively said no and downed tools for five months in a dispute over pay (including residual payments in the age of streaming), working conditions, and especially the increasing threat of artificial intelligence being used to not only write screenplays based on algorithms but to steal the likenesses of actors (living and dead) and store them in perpetuity without just compensation.

With Hollywood productions quiet for half the year and none of the “talent” allowed to promote those movies that were completed prior to the strikes, we ended up with a more limited and less enthusiastically received slate of major releases. Not even superhero movies or franchise sequels fronted by Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise were guaranteed hits anymore.

Despite all this, 2023 ended up being a pretty good year for cinema, with plenty of examples of not only memorable blockbusters but of distinct filmmakers leaving their mark and under-represented communities providing vibrancy and freshness to a myriad of new stories. Based upon UK release dates, these are my 10 Best Films of 2023.

Follow me @SSPThinksFilm on X (Twitter).

10. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah

You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah Review

2023 has been a great year for films about how Gen-Z processes their major life experiences, and this delightful, hilarious little film starring most of the Sandler clan (including Adam as an adorably schlubby dad) is up there with the very best.

As she approaches her her 13th birthday and the Jewish coming-of-age ritual, Stacy Friedman (Sunny Sandler) is determined to make her Bat Mitzvah the most perfect and memorable of her peer group, including that of BFF Lydia (Samantha Lorraine). But things get a lot more complicated as hormones, teenage crushes and petty but damaging psychological manipulation via social media enter the mix.

Five years ago, Bo Burnham made his memorable feature debut with Eighth Grade and told one of the most connective, visceral stories about becoming a teenager in years. Sammi Cohen’s film has the same aim but demonstrates how seismically culture has changed in just half a decade, all through a Jewish cultural lens. There may have never been a more challenging time to be growing up in an always-online age, and Alison Peck’s insightful script in addition to the across-the-board wonderfully naturalistic performances help to make this an unexpectedly profound crowd-pleaser.

9. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 Review

#JusticeforJamesGunn incarnate, the final chapter of the unlikeliest a-hole superhero team’s story shatters expectations and satisfyingly delivers on almost every level.

After years of defending the countless worlds together, the Guardians team has reached a precarious place. Their leader Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) has slumped into a depressed, alcoholic stupor after losing the love of his life Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), and Rocket’s (Bradley Cooper) past as a bio-engineered test subject comes back to haunt him in a very real way. Can the team come together one last time and save the galaxy, and themselves?

Marvel is seen as a pretty risk-averse studio and certainly much of their recent output has been received with a shrug from many viewers, but Guardians Vol 3 shows what happens when one of the best directors they partnered with is left to finish the story he wanted to tell. The action has never been more polished and visually dazzling, the performances from people and animated raccoons alike so honest and full of pain, Gunn’s love of animals so prominent as the team go up against a truly detestable figure who causes pain for the hell of it.

Recommended for you: MCU Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies Ranked

Of course, for any movie critic, there are films that rise above the rest. I have chosen ten films that have shaped me as a person and made this world a creepier, scarier, funnier, and more interesting place to live. These are my 10 Best Films of All Time.

Follow me on X (Twitter) – @emii_grant

10. Coraline (2009)

Are you a child looking to dip your foot into the wonderful world of horror? Coraline is a great place to start.

The film is as magical as it is scary – an impressive boast for a film with a PG rating.

Coraline Jones marches us through worlds we could have never imagined and somehow even makes rats feel ethereal and otherworldly. 

9. Gone Girl (2014)

“Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game.” While “cool girl” status isn’t attainable, watching Gone Girl and memorizing the infamous monologue gets you part of the way there.

Perfectly cast with Rosamund Pike as a psychotic and whip-smart writer, Amy, and Ben Affleck as her sloppy, loser husband, the two are a match made in hell.

As feminist as it is deranged, Gone Girl will keep you enthralled whether it’s the first time or the hundredth time you’ve watched the film. 

Recommended for you: David Fincher Movies Ranked

The films that have been selected are, I believe, the peak of cinematic mastery. They span nearly the length of cinema’s existence, and are deliberately chosen to reflect a wide range of genres, countries, and times. One major reason for this is to force myself to list films that are not exclusively 1980s horror movies, which I could quite easily do. The second is because that list would be wrong, as although they could be peak horror, some would undoubtedly be worse than films outside the genre.

Therefore, for better or for worse, at the time of writing, listed from oldest to youngest and with no system of ranking, here are my picks for the 10 Best Films of All Time.

Follow me on X (Twitter) – @KJudgeMental

10. La Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

It is impossible to understate how important this film was.

From the grandfather of special effects, Georges Méliès, come fifteen minutes of sheer adventure, adapting the Jules Verne novels “From the Earth to the Moon”, and “Around the Sun”, along with H. G. Wells’ “First Men on the Moon”, it is a film which pushed the limits of the medium, bringing thrills beyond the stars to the screen for all to see.

Hand-painted frame by frame to add a splash of colour, employing all of Méliès’ stage magic knowhow, it still has the power to captivate to this day, despite being created only seven years after the Lumiere brothers demonstrated their kinematograph at the 1895 December World Fair. The rocket splatting into the eye of the moon is an image almost everyone in the world has seen, despite rarely knowing where it comes from.

It is fun and joyous and, thanks to restoration work and new scores, able to keep its legacy going over 120 years later. Not a single cast or crew member from this film is alive today, yet A Trip to the Moon lives on.

9. Psycho (1960)

We could argue over Hitchcock’s best film for decades. Indeed, many have done, and we still never will agree. Vertigo famously dethroned Citizen Kane in Sight and Sound magazine as the best film ever in 2011, a title the Welles film had held for many decades. Yet Psycho takes my vote for numerous reasons.

Not only is its story iconic – the shower scene one of the greatest sequences in cinema history – and its production history something of legend, but it is supreme mastery of cinematic craftsmanship.

Every shot is glorious, every moment timed to perfection. Suspense is at an all-time high, mystery around every corner. Yet perhaps what is most startling is its efficiency, Hitchcock’s most underappreciated skill. If a scene required 50 cuts, he’d have it. If it required a simple shot/reverse shot with the most subtle of powerful, timed camera cuts to a tighter or a lower angle (see the dinner between Marion and Norman), he did it. It is an exercise in extreme precision, in efficiency of storytelling, and it cuts deeper than almost any other film.

Recommended for you: The Greatest Film Trailer of All Time? Psycho (1960)

Film gets me where I live like little else and has done ever since I was a teenager. It’s almost impossible to pick just 10 films to stand in for over a century of my favourite form of artistic expression, so what follows are a combination of groundbreaking, ageless films and the most personally impactful cinematic works for me, today. 

Follow me on X (Twitter) – @SSPThinksFilm

10. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Review

This one’s a twofer. I love animation and I love superhero movies, and Spider-Verse is one of the finest examples of both to release in the last decade.

After being bitten by a radioactive spider, awkward teen Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is thrust into inter-dimensional superherodom when his universe’s Spider-Man is killed in action. Miles must overcome self-doubt and team up with the many very different spider-people from other realities to stop his, and all other worlds, from being destroyed. 

Animation is cinema, it has the potential to visualise anything you can imagine, and while I could have picked any number of films from Studio Ghibli, Laika, Disney or Pixar, nothing else was as revolutionary and influential to the medium’s aesthetic than Sony Picture Animation’s Spider-Verse in recent years. This didn’t look or feel quite like anything else, a living comic book packed with pleasing details and gags referring back to print mediums and constant movement and dynamism. 

Few adaptations of popular characters manage to sum up their very essence with a single perfect phrase, but this film distils it all with “anybody can wear the mask”. So many superhero movies get the basics fundamentally wrong, but this gets it just so right – Spider-Man has always had incredible powers but struggled to balance his superhero responsibilities with everyday ones, and the same goes if you’re a dual heritage teenager, a cartoon pig or a black-and-white detective voiced by Nicolas Cage.

Recommended for you: Spider-Man Movies Ranked

9. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

The titanic cultural influence of the MGM fantasy musical The Wizard of Oz is often criminally overlooked. Musicals speak to me as a form of extroverted expression I could never hope to take part in myself, but Oz also stands for the whole fantasy genre.

This rough adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s children’s fantasy novel follows young Dorothy Gale (instant star Judy Garland), a Kansas dreamer who is swept away to the magical land of Oz by a tornado where she is persecuted by the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton, still terrifying) as she quests to find her way home.

It wasn’t just the way film musicals were staged for decades it inspired, either. Next time you watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy and see the orc armies marching past the gates of Mordor, think about how similar the blocking and the aesthetic is to the patrols outside the Wicked Witch’s castle.  Speaking of the Wicked Witch, you know the classic green-skinned, warty-nosed, pointy-chinned default look for such characters at Halloween? That comes from this film as well. And Margaret Hamilton’s all-timer of a baddie performance in contrast to the uncomplicated good of Dorothy and her companions is still one to behold. 

The “it was all a dream, or was it?” story structure is clichéd now, but this helped start it all. Startling Technicolor fantasy is kept entirely separate from sepia reality (the moment one world becomes the other still takes your breath away), but there is always that playful, winking final scene for you to hope that Dorothy perhaps has further adventures on her horizon. 

The year is 1995, and the child is me.

I can never verify how much of the above tale happened, or which parts of it I have embellished over the years, but the story is true. I specifically remember being told that the flower Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka drinks from and then takes a bite out of wasn’t real food, and I consequently went through the thought process of wondering what else in the film wasn’t real and who made all of those things. I can’t remember if prior to that moment I thought everything in films was a historical document of a true story, or whether I had any thoughts about them at all, but I know that watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was my light-bulb moment, my transition from being a baby into being a child, my moment of consciousness. 

The wonderment I found that day has been one of the most lasting and rewarding aspects of my three-plus decades on this planet. Each time I feel like my flame for cinema has been extinguished (by life, by society, by corporatisation, by existential threats to the theatrical experience, by politics), it has been sparked back into life by miraculous feat of cinematic artistry after miraculous feat of cinematic artistry. As I’ve grown and learned and progressed, I have been inspired, have been nurtured, and have been guided by film. 

With so many life-shaping, existential experiences to recall, and so many lessons learned and viewpoints shaped by this wondrous moving picture art form, I find myself in the same place I began: wide-eyed and cross-legged, jaw agape, entirely present. 

In this moment of absolute consciousness, the following ten films are what I have long deliberated to be the best of all time. These films are form-shaping, movement-defining, genre-topping pieces, each from remarkable filmmakers who were able to capture lightning in a bottle by making something greatly artistic and intellectually rewarding, something emotionally and contextually resonant. These films challenged convention, rewrote popular thought, established rules and in most cases broke them, and together they are the thousands of films I have experienced, the entire historical context of the industry I have studied in great depth, the more-than a quarter of a century of consciousness I have dedicated to the form. These are the 10 Best Films of All Time by me, Joseph Wade.

Follow me on X (Twitter – @JoeTFM

10. Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca Review

The modern Hollywood blockbuster is a monumental part of the cinema experience, and one of the reasons you’re reading this article and I’m writing it. Some of the classics that have lit up the big screen and revolutionised the form are Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, and The Dark Knight. While Buster Keaton’s timeless action-comedy The General (1926) has had perhaps the most direct influence of any film in history regarding contemporary studio filmmaking – many of its scenes still borrowed from and replicated to this day, its train scene being paid homage to in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One in 2023 – it is Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca that can be found most prominently across many modern thrillers, actioners, and superhero movies.

Curtiz’s romantic drama is perhaps the most overlooked film of all time regarding the size of its influence on modern filmmaking. There are sequences, set in the markets of Casablanca, that are almost directly copied in Star Wars and the Indiana Jones movies, and the film’s themes of good, evil, and the people in between being forced to choose a side, is a foundational aspect of every successful modern studio blockbuster. While the romantic themes of Casablanca may be lost in most mainstream tentpole releases in the 2020s – a sorry loss that we should fight to get back – the foundational parts of its script, and particularly the way it is presented, shot, and constructed in the edit, are ultra modern and ever-present in our current day cinema. You can watch Casablanca more than eighty years after its release and experience the same pacing as modern success stories like Top Gun: Maverick, which given the releases of the time and the size of the equipment used to film and edit them, is a remarkable achievement. 

Beyond the technical achievements and revolutionary ideas that caused its influence to be so long lasting, Casablanca is a powerful and emotive film. Humphrey Bogart soars to new career heights as a romantic leading man, Rick Blaine, the owner of Rick’s, a jazz bar in the titular Moroccan city of Casablanca. To think that he wasn’t thought charismatic enough to be a romantic lead during this era is remarkable in retrospect, but this performance is one that corrected that mistake and laid the foundations for one of the great romantic careers in Hollywood history. His character is reunited with an old flame, Ilsa Lund (played with all the natural fierceness that Ingrid Bergman imprinted onto every single one of her characters – she is arguably an even more powerful screen presence than Bogart), and the pair accidentally set light to old feelings. As it’s World War II, the Nazi forces of North Africa are an ever present threat to the two leads and their romance as well as the way of life of the entire cast of supporting characters. The USA was just entering the 2nd World War during the events of Casablanca, and the nation is romantically presented as a distant beacon of hope in the film; the promise land that the Statue of Liberty so gloriously signified to the millions of refugees and immigrants that made their way to the shores of New York and beyond at that time. 

This film features a lot of what we’ve all grown to love about the golden era of Hollywood, and even the biggest movies of today, but it is unique for the very reasons that it remains memorable and iconic so many decades later. It is tragic with a small glimmer of hope, Hays Code era romantic but not asinine, and features two of the most legendary screen actors of all time in all of their transatlantic accented best. No matter what you’ve heard of Bogart and Bergman, they’re all that and then some. Better still, they’re presented in that sumptuous black and white of the era, through risk-taking and modern cinematographic techniques, through the astonishingly detailed set design that you can’t help but to marvel at, and scored to perfection in a composition by Max Steiner that could very well be included on a very short list of movie scores to have helped build the foundations of Warner Bros. 

Casablanca is the archetypal Hollywood movie, the very best of a list of classics that includes Gone with the Wind and It’s a Wonderful Life. It is everything that the myth of Hollywood represents, a pristine example of cinema that captured the anxieties and the hope of its time like few other films managed to do, and told it in such a universally appreciated way that we can still feel forced to the edge of our seats and moved to tears in an entirely new century. Even with our modern understanding of the United States having been shifted to better understand non-white perspectives of its past, as well as the global perspectives of its present, Casablanca’s romanticised outlook on its nation, war, hope, and love, ensure it remains a culturally significant and artistically monumental Hollywood movie release, a shining light of the cinematic form.

9. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Singin’ in the Rain is the epitome of Golden Era Hollywood: vast soundstages dressed beautifully by experts in the field, lit with all the glow of the sun; once in a lifetime performers offering timeless qualities that you just don’t see anymore; a self-reflective narrative that pokes fun at the studio system; a happy time at the movies that keeps the conflict manageable and the highs universal, so even the little ones can enjoy themselves. This is Hollywood cinema; romance, music, colour and beauty, projected for all to see. 

The film stars Gene Kelly in the midst of his decade of superstardom. He’s a unique talent – a ballet dancer with movie star good looks, the kind of smile that could steal a nation of hearts – and the only person who could take a combination of songs discarded from other productions and make it into something irreplaceable within the annals of cinema history. He is the anchor around which everything floats, the fulcrum of the entire movie, the superstar upon whose back this entire era seemed to rest. Watching the Gene Kelly of the 1940s or 50s in the 2020s will have the same effect it did seventy years prior: the magic will simply pour out of the screen, drowning the noise of your every day and lighting up your endorphins time and time again.

In Singin’ in the Rain, Kelly plays a silent era film star whose career is about to meet an unfortunate end due to the advent of sound. He meets Debbie Reynolds’ party performer with a voice of gold in a chance meeting and the two court for the duration of the film’s runtime, her rise to relative superstardom coming as fast as Kelly’s relative fall from it. It’s all singing and dancing and pursuing the one thing you’ve been told you’re good at just because you believe it might one day work out for you; a Hollywood story about Hollywood that inspired youngest-ever Best Director Oscar winner Damien Chazelle on La La Land and Babylon; a type of self-aware American Dream narrative that doesn’t yet seem poisoned by the lost wars, anxieties and terror of the decades to come. 

Perhaps best of all, it is so fist-clenchingly uplifting. You truly feel the ecstasy of each career-orientated achievement just as the characters do. The music is, of course, vital to achieving this, and so far as original soundtracks go there are few (if any) better. From “Good Morning” to the titular track “Singin’ in the Rain”, this film is as loaded with classic songs as the best films of the era, as any era that followed, an often imitated but never duplicated success story.

As an adult, there are few viewing experiences that can show you something new, or fresh, or better than before, but witnessing Gene Kelly at the height of his powers is one of those experiences. His presence in Singin’ in the Rain is the realisation of all he brought to cinema in the ultra modern On the Town (1949) and the classic stage ballet on film, An American in Paris (1951). He isn’t the only glowing aspect of this cinematic marvel, but he is breathtaking, astounding, simply incomparable. Unmissable. 

Singin’ in the Rain was made in-part in tribute to the classics of the early Hollywood musicals, such as those by Fred Astaire (Top Hat, Swing Time), and continues to serve as inspiration for a wide variety of films to this day, from the entire plot being the basis of Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022) to the “I’m Just Ken” musical segment from Barbie (2023). But, as an artefact of Hollywood at its most sumptuous, timeless and expansive, it is perhaps even more special; arguably the greatest Hollywood studio movie of all time.

Recommended for you: Where to Start with Gene Kelly

So gather here today to celebrate your connection to your bounteous wi-fi, as The Film Magazine brings you this Movie List, revisiting the 10 Best Moments from Parasite. Respect!

Follow @thefilmagazine on Twitter.

10. Min Gives Ki-woo the Rock

It is a seemingly innocuous gesture, but comes to represent so much to the Kim family.

When Ki-woo’s college educated friend Min drops by the house unexpectedly, he brings with him a scholar’s rock. It’s an unusual gift, but he shares that his grandfather collects them and insisted that he brought this one for Ki-woo. Kim Ki-taek immediately starts analysing it, reminding us that this is a character who likes to demonstrate his knowledge in a variety of areas, while Ki-woo can only exclaim in awe, “This is so metaphorical!” 

It’s the first time we hear Kim Ki-woo utter what becomes an oft-repeated catchphrase, but the truth of it rings most prominently here. Min has told them, after all, that the rock is a symbol representing good fortune and wealth to come upon this family. And it does, not through the rock itself but through Min’s delivery: with him comes the opportunity for Ki-woo to tutor at the Park household, an invitation that sparks the events of the whole film. The rock is both Ki-woo’s way in, but also his downfall, as this later becomes the weapon that Geun Se attempts to kill him with.

9. Meeting Jessica

This clip was used repeatedly during Oscars season and, though only a small moment, it is certainly a memorable one.

Ki-jung comes to the Park household to interview for the role of Da-song’s art tutor, and pauses for a moment to remember the backstory that her brother has created for her as ‘Jessica from Chicago’. To do so, she sings a little song, to the tune of a Korean nursery rhyme. 

This is one of many funny moments in Parasite – amongst the political satire and scenes of graphic violence, it can be easy to forget that Bong Joon-ho’s film is definitely a black comedy. This moment reiterates that genre classification.

It also tells us something significant about the Kim siblings – this plot to secure their entire family jobs is a game to them. While they do need the money, and they do come to enjoy the roles, there is certainly a sense that conning the Parks is deliciously fun to them. This is only reiterated further in the scene following Jessica’s interview, in which the family have lunch together and she laughs as she tells them how she Googled art therapy and then improvised from there. 

Recommended for you: Every Non-English Language Best Picture Nominee Ranked

Memories of Murder (2003)
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Screenwriters: Bong Joon-ho, Shim Sung-bo
Starring: Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-kyung, Kim Roe-ha, Song Jae-ho, Byeon Hie-bong, Ko Seo-hie, Park No-shik, Park Hae-il

Before Bong Joon-ho received international attention with his 2006 monster-driven family drama The Host, and long before the game-changing awards juggernaut Parasite, he gave the world not only one of the finest murder-mysteries, but possibly one of the greatest Korean films of all time, Memories of Murder. Now the film has been digitally remastered in stunning 4k, you have the exciting opportunity to experience its dark majesty on the big screen or digitally at home.

In a re-telling of the police investigation into the gruesome Hwaseong Serial Murders committed between 1986 and 1991, we follow three mismatched detectives foiled by an elusive killer. Detective Park (Song Kang-ho) follows his misguided instincts to a fault and is prone to jumping to bizarre conclusions; Detective Cho (Kim Roe-ha) has a sadistic streak and is the first to resort to police torture to get a confession out of his suspects; Detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung) is a newly transferred big city cop who conducts his investigations completely by-the-book and according to procedure. But with pressure on from their superiors and the press, and little hard evidence to go on, hair-brained theories and fabrication soon come into play as the killer continues to evade capture.

The film opens at a crime scene as Detective Park arrives to find a young woman’s body stuffed into a drainage pipe. Another murder is committed soon afterwards, and the investigators surmise that they are dealing with a serial killer from the almost identical state of the victims’ bodies, having been raped and tied up with their underwear. The only leads the police have are tenuous – the murderer appears to prefer to strike when it rains, the same love song has been requested and played on the radio just before each incident, and the women killed were each wearing red.

Bong Joon-ho is a true master of macabre humour. You’ll find it nigh-on impossible to find another example of police torture-based humour. He creates such unique and weird characters, and derives comedy from their quirks and clashes with others. He also plays on the incompetence of the Korean police force – one of the funniest scenes is the opening where every new cop or forensic scientist who arrives at a crime scene takes a tumble down a grassy bank, and then an unaware civilian drives a tractor straight over a crucial set of footprints. Another scene sees the detectives break off their round of violent interrogation to watch a cop show and eat noodles with their suspect.

Bong uses the 1980s setting to criticise his country’s authoritarian past. Quite aside from Detective Cho, and to a slightly lesser extent Park’s jackbooted methods of questioning suspects, their superiors in the police and the government they represent are shown to be ineffectual and corrupt time after time. They don’t really care who is found guilty of the murders, or even who really did it, as long as they have some result to present to the journalists baying for blood. They are clumsy and heavy-handed, and proven wrong at every turn. Students rioting against their oppressive government are shown to have a direct negative impact on the case – blackouts and defence drills provide the killer with ideal cover of darkness, and military suppression of protests means that the police are left short-handed at a critical point in the investigation.

The cast are uniformly excellent, but Song Kang-ho is the standout. He plays Park as a clown trying to get the right result using all the wrong methods. He’s a goofball but full of pathos, the tragedy that so many women meet such brutal ends because the police and the government they represent could not fulfil their duties is palpable. Seo is continually frustrated by the backwards policing methods at play, his straight-arrow morality beginning to slip as time runs out, and while Park seems to have more faith in the system because it’s the only one he’s ever worked in, even his relative optimism is overwhelmed and both he and Seo become haunted by their continued failure in the film’s final evocative stretch that comes drenched in dramatic rainfall.

Memories of Murder is bleak but also black humoured, and it vitally marked out Bong Joon-ho’s talent to marshal his casts and crews to perform at the very top of their games; to master tonal juxtaposition and hefty themes in the most arresting manner possible. He was always going to be a great filmmaker, and now the Academy and mainstream audiences worldwide have recognised that, his earlier work will inevitably see a resurgence in popularity and interest. It’s about damn time.

24/24

Recommended for you: Bong Joon-ho Films Ranked

The Host (2006)
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Screenwriters: Bong Joon-ho, Ha Won-jun, Baek Chul-hyun
Starring: Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doona, Ko Ah-sung

To shamelessly appropriate and warp the catchphrase of a beloved cartoon character, The Host is smarter than the average monster movie.

I stumbled across this one on DVD years back, and it’s since become a firm favourite along with the rest of genre auteur Bong Joon-ho’s oeuvre. My affection for the film is not for the monster, as good as it is, but because of the very odd but very real family’s quest for healing, as well their need to stay together.

When a monster emerges from the Han river and takes their youngest member, the Park family must stop squabbling long enough to find it and bring their dysfunctional unit together again. But the Korean government and some shady American scientists are up to something and lock down Seoul to prevent unwanted snooping…

As is common with monster movies from Godzilla onwards, the creature itself (in this case a newt-dolphin-garbage crusher thing) is not the biggest threat to our heroes, rather it stands in for a greater evil of society: this time it’s the corruption of the Korean state-run institutions and the morally questionable invasive interference by the USA in Korean affairs.

Writer/director Bong not only made The Host a smart and entertaining thriller, but a tender family drama and a rip-roaring comedy. The hilariously dysfunctional Park family are all great characters, and you can really empathise with their plight as they frantically search for their youngest, Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung) who has been taken by the monster.

Song Kang-ho makes a compelling central protagonist, and makes the perpetually napping failure Gang-doo a comical but tragic reluctant hero. Here he is reunited with fellow regular Bong Joon-ho collaborators Byeon Hee-bong, Park Hae-il and Bae Doona playing the rest of the constantly bickering Park family. Their squabbles and ever-increasing desperation in failing to find Hyun-seo, though undeniably poignant, also provide plenty of opportunity for humour.

Bong is a true master of black comedy, extremely skilled at getting a laugh out of the most unexpected situation. In The Host, there’s a scene where the Parks gather around the shrine for the dead and missing post-monster attack. In most films, this scene would be a solemn one, but here Bong uses the family’s extreme reaction to their plight, the unanimous blame of Gang-doo for the accidental loss of his daughter, and the insults the family can’t resist trading with each other for their various shortcomings (“Look Hyun-seo, your aunt brought you a bronze medal!”) to provide the funniest moment of the film. It’s a perfect balance of tone, of the dark and the light, of tragedy and comedy, as the Park family clumsily grapple with each other in their hysteria and collapse, wailing on the floor.

The more restrained, emotionally raw moments in the film are nuanced and affecting, particularly the lip-wobbling moment when the family patriarch Hee-bong finally opens up to his children and confesses how much he truly cares for his eldest son Gang-doo while said son is apparently fast asleep. The action works well on its own terms too, with the CGI holding up remarkably well considering the film’s modest budget, and every set piece driven first and foremost by where the characters find themselves in their respective arcs.

Bong Joon-ho continually pushes boundaries and challenges genre filmmaking conventions, but never loses sight of what really matters – character, above all else. You’d have to be a complete moron to dismiss The Host as just another dumb creature feature. It’s sharp and layered, grounded and very much about this world and real human experiences despite its sci-fi trappings. I’m so grateful to this film for introducing me to Bong’s filmography, that of one of the world’s most vital cinematic voices of our contemporary age.

22/24

Parasite (2019)
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Screenwriter: Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won
Starring: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam

In The Guardian’s live Cannes coverage, Gwilym Mumford wondered “whether [Parasite]’s genre elements might hold it back” in the competition for the Palme d’Or. It went on to win the award unanimously, as 2019 judge Alejandro Inarritu (Birdman) said, on the merit of its cinema. Two years ago, the Academy Awards nominated Get Out for Best Picture, and thus it seems that genre is no longer a weight holding down otherwise excellent films.

Parasite is a dark comedy/thriller that follows an unemployed family as they move into the employ of a wealthy family. It never sticks too closely to one genre, and there’s a broad range of feelings that make the film feel real instead of the work of any particular genre. There’s incredible nuance to each of the characters, which is the best part of this awesome film.

Design choices are used to build the characters beyond their dialogue and action. Everyone involved has something hanging on their wall that tells you something about them, such as a self-portrait drawn by a child. The difference between the dwellings for each family best creates a contrast between them, and those locations are vital to the social story that lies at the heart of Parasite.

The pacing of the film wasn’t ideal, but whether that has to do with a Kishotenketsu (four act) structure or the editing and scene choices is hard to tell. The film moves briskly until it stays in an entertaining but comparatively lengthy sequence, and the scenes that follow are closer to the pacing of the beginning. That’s the sort of nitpicky, subjective critique that affects the judging of films at the top come awards season, but a first viewing could be improved by knowing ahead of time that the flow changes.

There will surely be more awards to come for Parasite, though no one can say it’s a shoe-in for anything. No matter what happens come awards time, Parasite is a fascinating and enjoyable film. If it’s showing near you, it is definitely worth checking out, not least because of its universal commentary, fantastic writing and phenomenal filmmaking.

22/24

Recommended for you: Windows into Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Parasite’