Swiri

In recent years, South Korean cinema has fully flowered, producing both uncompromising highly personal films and crisp, intelligent genre movies, with Shiri the most spectacular example of the latter to date.

A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.

Mr. Kang is a gifted choreographer of bloody chaos, but he has enough range and imagination to strew a few interludes of haunting tenderness amid the shell casings and ketchup packs.

Suffers most from being overlong.

The action looks impressive, even when nothing much is happening beyond local explosions or shattering glass, and the drama turns, affectingly, on a mysterious female sniper with a partitioned soul.

Suffers from all the excesses of the genre: gunfights that go on and on and on, a plot that is almost incomprehensible.

A thoroughly awful Korean production which vainly attempts to recast the slam-bang conventions of American action-adventure flicks into the sticky world of contemporary Korean politics.