Crying Fist: Eyes Swollen With Blood and Tears

In your typical boxing movie, the glory of the big fight depends on the depth of your feelings for one of the contenders: You need to like one guy more than the other. It's the story of an underdog, or of a man seeking justice or demanding payback or earning respect. But Ryu Seung-wan's Crying Fist undermines all that. By building to a championship between rivals with equally tearjerking back stories, this unconventional sports flick leaves you uneasy about rooting for either opponent. Suddenly, both sides deserve your sympathy. Weird!

In one corner is Gang Tae-shik (Choi Min-sik), a former silver medalist who now, over 40, scrapes out a living by letting frustrated passersby beat him up in the street for a fee. Part performance artist, part washed-up local hero, he's a bit of a joke who, more seriously, is going blind from head traumas, even as his wife (Seo Hye-rin) is divorcing him, and his brother (Lim Won-hie) is fleecing him of every won.

In the other corner is Yoo Sang-hwan (Ryu Seung-beom), an emotionally retarded criminal with a devoted, doomed father and a dying, maybe demented, grandma. As sad stories go, he's Tae-shik's equal, especially when you consider that Tae-shik at least has an ongoing bromance with a cafe owner (Jeon Ho-jin) while all Sang-hwan's got is the mentorship of a prison boxing coach (Byeong Hie-bong), who admits all his boys-in-training are like sons to him. Sang-won is just his latest protege.

This all adds up to the climactic fight being discomforting instead of rousing since getting in either guy's corner means abandoning his foe. You almost wish, Ryoo hadn't let the parallel stories converge, that he'd ended with two fights in two weight classes, making each loss and/or victory more personal. Pitting them against each other seems illogical. And yet, it's also what makes this movie so uniquely strange and good.

While hardly a philosophical film, Crying Fist does raise questions beyond who should win... Like why is redemption by violence attractive? How can a natural inclination towards violence be transformed into something constructive? When does a focused application of violence become perverted? When, how and why does violence pay off? Does it ever? Which isn't to say Crying Fist is a cinematic essay on pugilism. It's an effective melodrama. You bring the crying, this movie will bring the fists.

Daisy: She Loves Him Even Though He's Not Really Him

Are director Lau Wa-keung and his trio of screenwriters aspiring for super-heightened-naturalism with his romance-turned-spy-caper Daisy? Their movie sure takes the old maxim "Truth is stranger than fiction" at face value. For with nary an ironic wink or a melodramatic scream, this one keeps getting stranger and stranger as its story gets more and more complex. How did this happen? On their own, the characters are plausible if incompatible.

First up is Hye-young (Jun Gianna), a street artist who paints daisies as her humble homage to Van Gogh's Sunflowers. She lives with her grandfather at an antique shop in Amsterdam, favors the knit hat and layered clothing that proclaims "Bohemian," and sketches charcoal portraits in the town square despite having access to an enormous warehouse for painting oils and a date set for her (first?) solo gallery exhibit. If she lived in Paris, she'd smoke Gauloises; if she lived in NYC, she'd have needle-marks. You know the type.

Next up is Jeong-woo (Lee Seung-jae), an Interpol cop who's committed to busting crime rings at any cost. He's what you might call a noble opportunist. And so he uses Hye-young as a cover for monitoring drug trafficking. Then he seizes his chance to seduce her when she mistakes him for someone else. He's not a cad per se. But it feels as though he's in an espionage pic, not a romance, even after he confesses all after she's lost her voice from a gun shot wound that he blames on himself. (Since she can't speak, it's hard to say whether she accepts his apology.)

Finally, there's the assassin (Jung Woo-sung): Jeong-woo would love to catch him; Hye-young would love to marry him. Except for one thing... He's neither the target of Jeong-woo's investigation nor the lover of Hye-young's dreams. He's one of those stalker-boyfriend-criminal types, the guy who watches his prey clandestinely, courts her secretively, coerces her into a relationship by making her get into his car when she's mute, then ends up causing her death inadvertently. An ideal he is not. And then there's his profession: killing people. Need we say more?

For a good long while, Hye-young believes Jeong-woo is the secret admirer who's actually the assassin then she thinks that her lover-assassin has killed her lover-impostor. She's wrong on both counts. If she hadn't forfeited learning sign language and opted to spend the rest of her life communicating through index cards with common phrases on them, maybe she would've figured out her reality faster. Maybe she wouldn't be dead. And Jeong-woo wouldn't be dead. Maybe the assassin wouldn't be single either and left with a painting now splattered with his loved one's blood.

Blood Rain: A Murder Mystery with a Paper Trail of Proof

In 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared after her husband confessed to having an extramarital affair. What she did during those eleven days remains a mystery to this day. Director Kim Dae-sung's Blood Rain suggests, against the odds, that she may have flown to Korea and written an old-fashioned potboiler as a restorative. The plot is standard Christie. It's 1808 and the royal investigator (Seung Won-cha) -- working on an arson case on the island of Donghwa -- suddenly lands in the middle of a gruesome murder case. As any Christie fan knows, everyone's a suspect so while one piece of evidence points at the paper mill owner's son (Park Young-woo) and another at the local artist (Ji Seong), who did it, even who had it done to him, stays unknown 'til the bitter end. There's a rational vs. superstitious conflict at work here but only a genre novice would side with the villagers blaming the vengeful ghost of Commissioner Kang (Jeon Ho-jin). And while she's without a motive, the island shaman (Choi Ji-na) is the creepiest character on screen. No one else could inspire followers to chop the heads off five real-life chickens, a jarringly bloody sequence that makes a human dismemberment earlier in the flick that less memorable. I see a PETA protest coming.