Screening accompanied by an introduction.

You wait for one film about men chasing a car with valuable contents, and two come along. Yet where Lee Jae-won’s Thunderbird (2021) is a tense, bleak, Safdie-esque capitalist parable, Kwon Soo-Kyung’s film, named for the Eighties Hyundai Stellar at its centre, is an altogether sunnier affair.

In his estranged, recently deceased father’s old banger, repo man Yeong-bae (Son Ho-jun) pursues his debt-ridden friend Dong-sik (Lee Kyu-hyung) and the drug-filled Lamborghini that Dong-sik has stolen. With gangsters on his tail, Yeong-bae races down memory lane with a vehicle that is both a battered sentimental object from his happier childhood and quite possibly a living, sentient machine. This comic road/chase movie is an improbable blend of Drive My Car and Bumblebee, fuelled by nostalgia and real charm.

Anton Bitel