Korea

Some tropes in the film business are entirely divorced from the contents of any given film. One of these, oft-repeated, concerns the bright young débutante who is lavished with praise. In this narrative, the first-time director emerges from the soil in full bloom. They have made a competent movie, perhaps even a good one – though certainly not the epochal effort the adulation would have you believe.

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It’s drizzling when an Aimee Mann song plays in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker. You know the one: ‘Wise Up’, the scabrous number that soundtracks a famous sequence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), whose central cast – united by various machinations of fate – sing along in some kind of deranged processional, each character downcast and seeking salvation in Mann’s lyrics. None appears; the track literally ends with the words ‘give up’. ... (read more)