The first must-see film of the year.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

I am pretty sure in South Korea this movie will score higher than I rated it. When it's in your own language it's always easier to follow. And Korean is not a great language to listen to when you're not understanding it. It's sounds like they are always angry when they speak. The movie is nicely shot though. But the major problem I had with it was that it was too long and it took a really long time to become interesting. You could easily cut out the first hour of the movie where nothing major happens. I started getting bored actually. But the second part of the movie is way better, I would say from about where they are in the train. If the whole movie would be at that level of intensity I would have scored it higher. Most of the actors were good, some a bit lesser. All in all it's worth a watch. From the Asian movies I watched the Koreans are for sure the best ones.

THE AGE OF SHADOWS is a cracking period thriller that comes to us courtesy of South Korea. The setting is the 1920s and it's a period of Japanese occupation, in which resistance members are doing their best to bring down the Japanese government. I'm not sure why some describe the plot as complicated, because this is straightforward stuff indeed, albeit dense. It is even predictable at times, but that matters little when the production values are so lush and refined. The film plays out a cat and mouse game between the Japanese and the resistance, told from the point of view of a man caught in the middle.There's very little to dislike about this expertly-directed movie from Kim Jee-woon, the man who previously made the likes of I SAW THE DEVIL and THE LAST STAND. The action scenes are fluid and the opening shot of the soldiers jumping from roof to roof is jaw-droppingly artistic and refined. The running time is a little overlong but there are some great set-pieces here in which the violence isn't skimped upon. The half-hour train interlude has rightly been marked out as the film's highlight, a masterwork in suspense that reminded me of the bar scene in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. The film's exemplary cast includes a cameoing Lee Byung-hun alongside TRAIN TO BUSAN's Gong Yoo and the always excellent Song Kang-ho.

I have to wonder if director Kim Jee-Woon titled this film in some part after the Melville WW2 film Army of Shadows. This isn't to get all movie trivia on you all, rather it's to make a small point about how Jee-Woon is doing two things in The Age of Shadows and doing them well: making a sort of homage to films about resistance movements and espionage during wartime (in a way this makes this a war film, but the front-lines are often with a few people behind closed doors, or trying to find people on a train who are incognito, or sides being reversed, with torture on the table for the side with power to those captured), and at the same time it's Jee-Woon making a film about his own country's history, when Korea was occupied by Japan, which adds a personal dimension to it.While I'm sure if I was Korean I would have more of a connection to it - I actually didn't know as much about this history as I thought - knowing about other resistance and underground movements against occupying powers (and another film that comes to mind outside of Melville's film, which is much darker than this, is Inglourious Basterds) makes the drama palpable. Oh, and the actual conflicts and character dynamics pop every possible moments. It's a story about loyalty and honor, but also how difficult that really is: the point of view is mostly from Song Kang-Ho (remember him from Snowpiercer and The Host and other films by Bong Joon-Ho?), a Korean born officer for the Japanese police who was one years before part of the resistance against Japan, but has now gone to the side of conformity. But people underground, including Kim Woo-Jin who is wanted by the top Japanese police brass, see some potential in Hang-Ho's character, the conflict in him deep down, and look to "open his heart" to turn for them. Partially.This is a complex film, and I'm sure on a first screening a few plot points here and there or little scenes made it so that I'm also sure a second screening might clear up a few things (it's a long film too at 140 minutes, not unlike Army of Shadows, so it's kind of dense viewing - not a bad thing, just what it is). In this complexity the filmmaker, who also is the writer, finds a lot of strong thematic connections, how we as the audience can fill in the gaps that might be questioning on how or why characters decide to do things, the journey for Lee Jung-Chool as alright cop to gray-area level traitor, and it doesn't shy away from gruesome details and moments. It doesn't dwell on things like the torture scenes, when resistance fighters who are captured and given burning skewers or ripped-off finger-nails, but it's important to show enough of that so it impacts certain characters. At the same time the violence is brutal but cut quick (not too quick, of course), which also brings back to mind Basterds.What I mean to say going back to 'complex' is that you have to pay attention to it (you look at your phone while watching this for a second and you'll miss something, put it away, it's not that kind of movie - aside from that you'll miss the often exquisite filmmaking and those moments where the screws tighten like that entire sequence on the train that makes up a 20 minute chunk midway through). It treats its audience like adults who can take some very hard decisions from characters, and also how subtle cues can alert people to things, and yet at the same time there's even some humor here and there. When the main resistance guy gets introduced to Lee Jung-Chool, the way to make things a little less, uh, 'tense' is to go through an entire barrel of liquor. How this one minute of film is cut together, showing drink after drink tumbled down until the barrel is empty, is one of the funniest things this year - but, again, subtle-funny. It's more about character than anything else.This is at times a rough film, its twists and turns confronting your expectations and making you question what's going to come next, and other times bleak and depressing. But it all leads up to a place that is phenomenal in terms of its dramatic arc and how the director builds up the kind of palpable suspense that shows he's watched his share of The Godfather a thousand times (but he makes it his own, it's not aped to annoyance). He's so assured that he goes past being one of the most skillful directors in Korea right now; The Age of Shadows confirms after massively entertaining and incredibly dark efforts like The Good, the Bad, the Weird and I Saw the Devil as basically someone in the entire WORLD that should be cherished. This is a remarkable film, and one of the better, more harrowing efforts of 2016.

Mil Jeong (밀정 ~ The Age of Shadows). Viewed at 2016 Venice FilmFestival. Tremendous Korean epochal drama about life and resistance under the oppressive Japanese occupation in the early decades of the century. Director Kim Jaewoon really knows how to set up drama and suspense mixed with blazing action. There was so much in this film that I felt like I was watching a Beethoven symphony. Dark Sepia toned photography used to good effect enhances period feel. Musical soundtrack employs jazz and adrenaline tensor stretches and the final shootout in the train station is orchestrated deftly to Ravel's Bolero.139' running time is long and winds up with several anticlimactic codas but never lets you out if its grip. For Koreans this is clearly a film with heavy patriotic messages. The final theme is "Don't let your failures stop you -- build on them and rise to the next level" -- until victory is achieved. I would love to see this film with a Korean audience and would expect to see people on their feet cheering at the end... A young Italian I met afterwards said he loved it even though he knows nothing of the history involved. I could easily see why -- in a way this is something like a Kimchee spaghetti western and charismatic actor Kang-ho Song, 49, has got to be the Korean equivalent of John Wayne, or at least, Robert Mitchum.