The Unordained: Dark Nuns (2025) Review

 Director: Kwon Hyeok-jae

Notable Cast: Song Hye-kyo, Jeon Yeo-been, Lee Jin-uk, Moon Woo-jin, Huh Joon-ho, Kim Guk-hee, Massimo Fierro

Right at a decade ago, in 2015, Jang Jae-hyun burst onto the scene with his exorcism horror film, The Priests, a feature-length expansion of his 2014 short, 12th Assistant Deacon. This film garnered considerable attention and buzz in South Korea, and fans of the region flocked to see this highly effective and absolutely unnerving piece of horror cinema. Now, in the current year 2025, we get a return to this dark and chilling, spiritually driven world with a "sequel" of sorts. I wouldn't quite call it a traditional follow-up, but Dark Nuns ties back into the first film. Thankfully in more ways then one, and yes, before we even get going here, I do absolutely think a third film will be made, and hopefully it doesn't take another decade before that happens, for reasons I won't spoil here.

Directors in Focus: Yoon Jong-bin | Kundo: Age of the Rampant (2014) Review

Director: Yoon Jong-bin

Notable Cast: Ha Jung-woo, Gang Dong-won, Lee Kyung-young, Lee Sung-min, Cho Jin-woong, Ma Dong-seok, Yoon Ji-hye, Kim Hae-sook Han Yeri, Kim Kkob-bi

After having dropped an extraordinary gangster film, my eyes and heart had become set on whatever Yoon Jong-bin would go on to do next, and then in 2014, only two years later, he revealed to the world a genre mash-up in the form of Kundo, a massively entertaining action film, filled with plenty of laughs and thrills. It's an emotionally adept film that never shies away from the brutality that many faced in their lives during the era in which the film takes place. It almost feels like a Tarantino-esque picture (not someone I usually like comparing others to), but it feels like it here. It takes a lot of genres, old martial arts and wu xia pics from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the Spaghetti Westerns that Italy was putting out in its heyday, and brings it all forward with a modern lens and sense of filmmaking. There is a lot of harkening back to those works, even in the editing and, at times, the techniques (plenty of great snap zooms used here), but the film also has an identity and flavor of its own, and that helps to make it a truly invigorating and vivacious piece of work.