While watching La Haine (1995), it doesn't take long for even the least attentive filmgoers to recognize director Kassovitz's dependence on suffusing the entire narrative with pop-culture and meta-cinematic references. As a film about the mercurial nature of racial and cultural anxieties among disenfranchised youths, such narrative devices may be necessary, as the three lead characters - estranged from their ancestry and marginalized from society - borrow from cultures outside of their own to create a sense of identity. The…

Those who are intimately familiar with Kim Jee-woon's filmography will argue that his defining characteristic as a storyteller is not his penchant for genre experimentation, despite having the reputation of a distinguished genre filmmaker, but his stylistically audacious construction of cinematic realities. Kim's films are spatial journies that demonstrate the camera's ability to render a setting into a thematically malleable landscape. Not only are locations treated as pure abstractions of the core themes of his stories but also given roles…