Chan-wook Park (the Quentin Tarantino of South Korea) completes his "bizarre and curiously cathartic revenge trilogy" (which includes last year's great and grisly Oldboy, of which Tarantino himself may have been the world's biggest fan) with what "may be the most palatable of the three, and certainly the most darkly comic. Powered by a glowering performance [by Yeong-ae Lee], it is a walloping tale of a woman who completes a 13-year prison sentence for a kidnapping and murder she did not commit, and upon her release, heads straight for the guy who did it...Park, a visually gifted director whose films are brimming with ideas, apparently can never resist a chance to gross out an audience -- among the "pleasures" of Oldboy was the eating of a live octopus and the severing of a tongue. The torture scenes that close Lady Vengeance are strong stuff; one hopes an international observer was present on set to monitor violations of the Geneva Conventions. However, unlike the previous two installments, Lady Vengeance generates on odd feeling: hope. If Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance [first in the trilogy] wondered how heretofore law-abiding citizens could be driven to do very bad things, and Oldboy investigated the personal price of pure revenge, Lady Vengeance is ultimately about redemption -- about growing as a person and changing past behavior." (SF Chronicle) More at www.lady-vengeance.com
2006, color, 1 hour 52 minutes, South Korea