"One of the recent cinema's deepest portraits of an artist." -- Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“A bittersweet accounting of the geography of desire. Mr. Hong’s elegant, restrained films chart the mysteries
of the heart and the follies of the head with intelligence and shock waves of feeling… Mr. Hong has a talent for mixing
the sweet and the sour, for balancing humor with heartache, levity with pain. Wry and tender and delicately melancholic.
WOMAN ON THE BEACH shows a newly confident filmmaker again working near the top of his form.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“BEST BY DAY: Imploding relationships and immature men color Hong Sang-soo’s bitterly romantic comedy.”
– Time Out NY

“Master of the beautifully modulated and devastatingly melancholy romantic farce….
(he) is the most Frenchified of contemporary Korean directors…affinities not only with
Eric Rohmer but Albert Brooks in his deadpan presentation of absurd antics. Any of his films could
be subtitled The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. A rueful tale of karmic irony, self-deceived desire,
squandered second chances, and unforeseen abandonment.”         
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice       

” – David Fear, Time Out NY

"Assured, artful, and easily Hong Sang-soo's most accessible film. An anti-love story, illustrating the virtual impossibility of anyone finding the right man or woman to settle down with, because there are too many viable choices... A stripped-down, witty explication of how we all get stymied by the impulses and options inherent in the simple act of living."
- Noel Murray, The Onion

“Sensitively observed. Often cringingly funny.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The New York Sun

“WOMAN ON THE BEACH is intelligent, a quality lacking in too many movies these days.
The pace is leisurely, the humor sly, and the cast superb.”
– V.A. Musetto, New York Post

“HONG SANG-SOO BELONGS TO A FAST-GROWING CATEGORY OF INTERNATIONAL FILMMAKERS: MASTERS AT THE HEIGHT OF THEIR POWERS who remain almost entirely unknown in the United States… Mr. Hong, a wry, unsparing anatomist of the romantic discontent of South Korean twenty- and thirty-somethings (with special emphasis on the failings of South Korean men), has made his most coherent and emotionally accessible film yet. On the surface the story of a short, not-too-happy love affair, filmed in a clear, unassuming style, it turns out on closer examination to be full of subtle narrative symmetries and visual patterns. It’s a wicked comedy of manners…” — A.O. Scott, The New York Times

SOUTH KOREA • 2006 •127 MINUTES • IN KOREAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • NEW YORKER FILMS