Oldboy

2005 | 118 minutes | Rated R

A businessman in Seoul (Min-sik Choi) passes out after a drunken revel and wakes up in a private prison cell, where he spends the next 15 years wondering who incarcerated him and why. Just as arbitrarily, he finds himself set free, though his mysterious captor continues to torture him with cryptic communications. This stylish South Korean noir (2003) by Chan-wook Park won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, but there's a lot less here than meets the eye. The premise may suggest Kafka, but once the hero has been released onto the neon-lit streets, this devolves into the sort of hypercruel Asian pulp popularized by Takashi Miike before settling at the level of an old Fu Manchu programmer. In Korean with subtitles. By J.R. Jones

Official Site: films.tartanfilmsusa.com/oldboy
Director: Park Chan-wook
Producer: Kim Dong-ju
Cast: Choi Min-Sik, Yu Ji-tae and Gang Hye-jeong