Information sources
The best English language resource on Korean film is Darcy Paquet’s koreanfilm.org, which has reviews, news, features, discussion forums and more.
The Internet Movie Database (imdb) is a very comprehensive source of films, actors and directors, and there’s a very dedicated person who contributes to Darcy’s site who updates all the Korean films on the database. He’s even been going through the entries to update all the spellings for the changes in transliteration methods. You can do a power search on imdb for Language = Korean, and sort by imdb ranking. Treat the results with a massive pinch of salt because the rankings which come up under this search don’t benefit from imdb’s moderation process. For example, at the time of writing Daisy has a score of 9.7 out of 10 (based on 18 votes by devoted Jeon Ji-hyun fans), higher than the Godfather, imdb’s official highest ranked movie of all time with a score of 9.1 (based on 157,199 votes). And the consensus among the cognoscenti is that Daisy is not one of the best films ever.
Jason Bechervaise’s koreanfilm.org.uk (unconnected with Darcy’s site) is a recently started UK site containing lively commentary and, coming soon, lots of reviews and other information.
Other sites containing information & reviews on Korean film
Twitch is a film blog which has extremely good coverage of Korean film news. Filmbrain is another.
Mediacircus has very user-friendly reviews of the more recent Korean films.
Kung Fu Cult Cinema has some fun reviews, including lots of still from the films, while Luis Canau’s Portuguese site on Asian film is progressively being translated into English. Heroic Cinema has a good selection of reviews by resident Korean film expert James Brown among others; Brown also contributes to Senses of Cinema, where among other things he has written a profile of talented director Song Il-gon. Finally, there’s the excellent Firecracker online magazine, which covers Asian film generally but has good coverage of Korean film.
Where to buy
I buy most of my DVDs from either Play.com for Region 2 disks (filter on DVD Language = Korean to get all the Korean films) or YesAsia for Region 3 / all-region disks. HMV often have good selections of region 2 Korean films, but make sure you buy in the sale. SeoulSelection and YeonDVD only have Korean films, which sometimes makes things easier to find. YeonDVD, run by Darcy’s wife, is gradually winding up as family commitments take over.
Where to watch TV
DJG UK Fan has a helpful post about how to watch Korean TV on the internet for the price of a small piece of software. Plus, coming soon, Interactive Korean-American TV will be online.
More
Check the links at the top of the sidebar for more on films and soaps. There’ll be more coming soon. There are a few more directors I need to include.
