Comedy Archives - London Korean Film Festival

YMCA Baseball Team

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:36:29 +0000

Set in the final years of the Empire of Korea, Lee Ho-chang (Song Kang-ho), the son of a scholar, first picks up the modern game of ‘baseball’ on a YMCA field. He then goes on to form Joseon’s first-ever baseball team with the help of Western-educated female coach Min Jung-rim (Kim Hye-soo), Japanese Confucian scholar Oh Dae-hyun (Kim Joo-hyuk), and pro-Japanese bureaucrat’s son Ryu Kwang-tae (Hwang Jung-min). The team’s ultimate game against a Japanese military team goes beyond a simple sporting match, instead transforming into a stage that symbolises the tension between a nation’s crumbling sovereignty and the late arrival of modernity.

This work is the feature film debut of director Kim Hyeon-seok and is a comedic reinterpretation of the true story of the Hwangseong YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) baseball team. As a sports movie with the texture of a romantic comedy, the film cheerfully draws out the aspirations, despondencies, and solidarity of young people trying to absorb the unfamiliar rhythm of ‘modernity’ in their own ways. When rewatched on the 80th anniversary of Korean independence, YMCA Baseball Team is a film that clearly shows how the seeds of autonomy and freedom can begin to sprout even before true ‘liberation’ arrives.

Park Se-ho

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Hi-Five

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:01:22 +0000

The superhero saga gets a distinctly Korean twist in the high-octane, high-spirited romp Hi-Five, the latest from Swing Kids director Kang Hyoung-chul.

When a mysterious organ donor dies, the recipients of their vital organs, all unknown to each other, begin to develop strange new powers. Five of them band together as an unlikely superhero crew, while the sixth, the ailing leader of a cult, hunts them down to absorb their powers.

Bursting with comic book flair, Hi-Five blends mirth and mayhem, keeping the foot on the gas and tongue firmly in cheek throughout.

Pierce Conran

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The Informant

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:43:50 +0000

Kim Seok’s action comedy knowingly — and relentlessly — subverts the established tropes of ‘cops and robbers’ movies, and keeps wrongfooting expectations, faking the viewer out in much the same way that its characters constantly dissemble. As deceit, disguise and double-dealing reign, this is a broad, bombastic entertainment, never predictable but always funny.

Anton Bitel

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LKFF 2024 Opening Gala: Victory + Q&A with director Park Beom-su

admin — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 08:12:19 +0000

In 1999, two rebellious teenagers start a cheerleading squad for their provincial high school, bringing confidence and solidarity to themselves, their misfit troupe and an entire community afflicted by narrow horizons and labour disputes. Like Lukas Moodysson’s We Are the Best! (2013), Park Beom-su’s joyously punkish and irreverently funny crowd-pleaser has infectious charm, winning wit and girl-power exuberance to spare.

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Handsome Guys

admin — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:21:07 +0000

“This used to be a home to an American missionary,” the realtor tells carpenter Jae-pil (Lee Sung-min) and Sang-gu (Lee Hee-joon) of the dilapidated country house that the stepbrothers are about to buy and refurbish so that they can enjoy a quiet life together. “Villagers were so grateful that they built him a Western-style home.”

Writer/director Nam Dong-hyub’s feature debut similarly imports American furnishings to its Korean setting, reimagining Eli Craig’s deconstructive redneck horror comedy Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010), with Jae-pil and Sang-gu the sweet-natured hicks whom city folk keep prejudicially confusing with backwoods serial killers. Nam keeps things fresh with some unexpected recombinations of story elements from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) – but mostly this is high body-count cabin-in-the-woods slaughter charmingly reconfigured as a comedy of errors, where first impressions can be misleading and handsomeness is in the eye of the beholder.

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FAQ + Q&A with director Kim Da-min

admin — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 09:26:02 +0000

Eleven-year-old Dong-chun, a struggling student shuffled between after-school classes by her mother, discovers a barrel of rice wine at summer camp. She realises that its bubbling isn’t just the result of fermentation, but are words spoken to her. This sci-fi adventure offers a subversive take on private education, with Park Na-eun impressing as the charming and bold protagonist.

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The Tenants

admin — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 16:12:37 +0000

“I feel like I’m stuck in the same place no matter how hard I try,” says Shin-dong (Kim Dea-gun), near the beginning of Yoon Eun-kyoung’s feature debut. In a city stricken with air pollution and exorbitant rents, Shin-dong works as a desk drone, sleeps in a cramped apartment, and dreams of a paradisiac beach, or at least of the cleaner, more modern Sphere 2. Yet when he is forced to sublet his bathroom to a pair of very strange, always grinning newlyweds (Heo Dong-won, Park So-hyun), the nightmarish realities nature of his life settles in.

While set in the future, this Kafkaesque dystopia cohabits with the features of today’s urban existence: alienating routine, online-only companionship and shrinking prospects, where the only escape lies in surrender to delusion and despair. At first witty, whimsical and weird, this eventually accommodates a bleak heart of darkness.

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Nipple War 3

admin — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 05:38:50 +0000

Television producer Yong is ordered by her department head to pixelate the nipples in an image of a braless female celebrity. Yong, unable to understand why you’d hide a natural part of the body, defies order and starts a war. Alongside the unique and fiery personalities of its characters, Nipple War 3 captured audiences’ attention with its enjoyable and provocative air, whilst also questioning Korean society’s current views about women’s bodies.

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Director’s Intention

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 23:37:04 +0000

Busan-based location scout Sun-hwa (Han Sun-hwa) believes that a location should be invested with feelings to express the director’s intention – which gets personal when she has to work at the last minute with director Do-young (Lee Wan), the ex-boyfriend who some time ago left town (and her) to work in Seoul, and is now back for a trip down memory lane, and possibly to rekindle old love. Sung-hwa has a repertoire of resonant locations that she thinks will suit Do-young’s film, but is there still a place for her in his heart?

Like Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s 36 (2012), Kim Min-geun’s sophisticated second-chance romance foregrounds the contribution of a location scout’s work to a film. Agreeably self-reflexive and unusually understated in its melodrama, this locates nostalgia, situation and memory at the centre of cinema, and inevitably comes with a strong sense of place.

Anton Bitel

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Stellar: A Magical Ride

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 20:33:04 +0000

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

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