Popular reviews

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  Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★½ 4

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  From words to gestures, from black and white to color, from ideas to feelings. Sang-soo understood that to film someone is to fall in love with that person, and when that feeling lasts beyond the images captured miracles such as this film are allowed to exist. Forever learning, learning to look, to film, to speak, to think, to write, to live, to love. Such a beautiful and profoundly generous film. One of the most beautiful ‘I love you’ ever pronounced in the history of cinema.

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  Review by jacobmazur ★★★★★ 10

  HE DID IT WHAT THE FUCK HE TRANSCENDED HONG SANGSOO IS SUPERHUMAN THIS IS EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA THIS IS WVERYTHING KIM MINHEE WEARS A LEATHER JACKET AHHHHHHH PROBABLY THE BEST B&W CINEMATOGRAPHY SINCE LIKE FUCKING MY DARLING CLEMENTINE FUCK

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★½

  It feels odd to single out a Hong Sang-soo movie as being especially “personal” — it’s not as if any of the prolific Korean auteur’s playful, recursive, and relentlessly idiosyncratic micro-budget work has been withholding or made for hire — but “The Novelist’s Film” hits a bit different than many of Hong’s recent ditties. Why is that?

  Despite being a little breezier than “Grass,” more accessible than “Introduction,” and more fluid than “Hotel by the River” (to namecheck just three of the other black-and-white features he’s made in the last four years), “The Novelist’s Film” is still just another tipsy sketch of artistic self-negation. The forcefully lackadaisical story it tells — about a frustrated author low-key ambushing an old friend…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  This is so perfect structure in this give and take between casual and inevitable. It moves perfectly and makes great of its suggestion if day in the life diary. Careful observed and packed with small stolen moments and gestures It makes more than most Hongs out of small variations from recognizable bits as fits a movie about how life is filtered through fiction.

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 10

  Hong Sang-soo has been on a fantastic streak lately, and The Novelist's Film is yet another high, his best movie in years. Nobody else makes films like he does, so uninterested in trends and budgets and ambition, just humble, unassuming, comforting cinema. The Novelist's Film is self-reflexive as usual, accompanied by a sly sense of humour. The film is mostly about a storyteller and an actress, with much of the film dedicated to their desire to work together. They discuss things as artists do, fearing that what seemed simple and natural before must now be exaggerated to make art which still has meaning. The Novelist's Film is about the expectations on a storyteller, with Hong using the movie to play…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 8

  Finding inspiration in the ordinary. A film about process, yes, but unlike myriad others of its ilk (most of which I’m averse to), what Hong does here is nothing short of revelatory, maybe even transcendent, for all the reasons that films like 8 1/2 or pretty much any of Kaufman’s stuff fail for me: no ghastly navel-gazing, no borderline-narcissistic sense of grandiosity, no delusional proclamations or fallacies that your work’s just so goddamned important that the world might well end without it—none of that. In fact, what we get here is the exact opposite. It’s about an unceasing search for passion and a dedication to whatever you do; it’s about creating without expectations, ulterior motives, ceremoniously-conveyed ideas or ensorcell pomp. Keeping it…

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  Review by Yongene Wong ★★★★★ 3

  Hong's first film about EVERYTHING. Not a film about dysfunctional relationships, not a film about terrible men, or a film with multiple parts and twists. THE NOVELIST'S FILM couldn't be described as anything other than a film about nothing and everything. From the very second the film begins, everything about it resembles a typical a Hong film, but as it progresses you begin to realise his typical narrative twists and turns no longer exist, dragged away in the gusts of wind of the parks and streets that our characters venture across and what is eventually left is the remaining elements left in a Hong film: the vibes, and Hong himself.

  Hong is Jun Hee. He wants to make movies. She…

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  Review by Amalia Ulman ★★★★★

  Full of charisma!

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  Review by Nick Newman

  Those rare opportunities to see a Hong for the first time in theaters — above 720p resolution, without “SAMPLE” emblazoned in the corner — are occasion to remember he’s the world’s greatest director.

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  Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★★½ 1

  Quando você pensa que o cara já transcendeu, ele vai lá e mostra que, literalmente, está apenas começando a olhar pro mundo.

  Comentei aqui: youtu.be/HdGzwjNlVzY

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  Review by Hibiscus ★★★★ 3

  SEMI SPOILERS BELLOW:

  I have to be honest here..... The majority of the film was good, but didn't really do much to me.... That was until the ending came.

  truly one of the most beautiful sequences I've ever seen in a Hong film, and I'm not sure if it will hit other the same way, but it just felt incredibly unfiltered and real, while still being meta.

  Love is what it's all about, and you can really feel the love HSS has for KMH in that moment.

  Hong is the friend every cinephile wants, and we should consider ourselves lucky, as he usually brings us gifts like these a couple of times a year!

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½

  "The Novelist’s Film isn’t one of Hong’s usual dramedies about the ways men and women perceive themselves and wind each other up, often during drunken squabbles over soju. Here his focus is on how Jun-hee, nearing 70, still struggles to fulfill her restless creative spirit, and he beautifully keys the film’s digressive rhythm to the frustration of her writer’s block."

  Full review: www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-novelists-film-review-hong-sang-soo/