Part of MKC's coverage of the 11th New York Asian Film Festival.
Korean cinema is filled to the brim with genre offerings and one of its most successful areas is with the gangster film. These are called ‘jopok’ films, which is a Korean word for gangster and we did a whole series on the genre here on MKC not so long ago called ‘Jopok Week’. Clearly I’m a big fan of gangster films and like many others I grew up on the likes of the Godfathers (Part II is my favorite if anyone cares to know) and Goodfellas (1990) but it didn’t take me too long to get turned onto more far-flung examples of the genre, ranging from Brazil’s City of God (2002), Italy’s The Conformist (1970), France’s Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le Flambeur, 1956; Le Samourai, 1967) and Japan’s Kinji Fukasaku (Battles Without Honor and Humanity, 1973-76).
Korean cinema is filled to the brim with genre offerings and one of its most successful areas is with the gangster film. These are called ‘jopok’ films, which is a Korean word for gangster and we did a whole series on the genre here on MKC not so long ago called ‘Jopok Week’. Clearly I’m a big fan of gangster films and like many others I grew up on the likes of the Godfathers (Part II is my favorite if anyone cares to know) and Goodfellas (1990) but it didn’t take me too long to get turned onto more far-flung examples of the genre, ranging from Brazil’s City of God (2002), Italy’s The Conformist (1970), France’s Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le Flambeur, 1956; Le Samourai, 1967) and Japan’s Kinji Fukasaku (Battles Without Honor and Humanity, 1973-76).
