Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, dir. Park Chan-wook, 2002

For a plotty film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance has a literary aspect that I couldn’t place until the second act, when it occurred to me: Thomas Mann! But what does a 2002 crime thriller have in common with a German quasi-modernist? Like Mann, Park tosses you into his tale without explicit character exposition. You figure out who’s who the way you might at a party in real life-by observing relationships and revising assumptions until the cast is clear. As a side note, a minor (but pleasurable) aspect of the film is watching Song Kang-ho ravish the screen some 17 years prior to Parasite-the film that, of course, introduced him to a grateful Mainstream America™.

Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, dir. Jennifer Baichwal, 1998

Baichwal’s first feature, a portrait of the writer and composer Paul Bowles, commences with the carving of a goat’s head. Taking us inside the mind of her hero, his agnostic reflections course through 1930s Paris toward a withdrawal in Tangier. Lonesomeness bookends Bowles’s story: he reveals his true self in his depictions of others. Thick description met with restraint manufactures an abstract violence that exists between desire and desolation.

Hill of Freedom, dir. Hong Sangsoo, 2014

A dropped pile of letters shuffles the entire narrative arc of The Hill of Freedom. Sent by a man to the woman he thinks he might be in love with. As we, the audience, begin piecing his story together, we are told another story of confusion, loneliness, and hope. It’s a characteristically playful puzzle from the prolific Korean director. Weaving the element of chance into the narrative makes it one of the most quietly unique depictions of longing ever put to film. Have you ever dreamt of Rohmer and Ozu making a movie with John Cage?