The 10 best Korean movies from 2003, the year of Oldboy, Memories of Murder and A Tale of Two Sisters – and maybe the best year ever for Korean cinema
- 2003 was a watershed year for South Korean cinema, with a new generation of filmmakers putting out wild, inventive and original works
- From Son Ye-jin’s starmaking role, to Jun Ji-hyun’s revelatory turn in The Uninvited, to Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, we pick that year’s top 10 Korean films
In the wake of Parasite’s historic success at the Academy Awards in 2020, South Korean cinema has been enjoying its moment in the sun.
Yet for many people, the industry’s peak came 20 years ago, during a landmark year that saw many legendary Korean filmmakers release what were arguably their best films.
Back in 2003, Korean cinema was in the middle of a resurgence. It was only the second year in which locally produced films accounted for more than half of box office sales in South Korea – the first was 2001 – and a new generation of filmmakers who had experienced the country’s change from a military dictatorship to a modern democracy in the late 1980s were coming into their own.
Before they became all-powerful media empires, film studios were young and inexperienced; unsure of themselves, they trusted these filmmakers and their trailblazing producers. The result was a cornucopia of wild and inventive cinema the likes of which we may never see again.
Here is the Post’s pick of 10 furiously original works that we consider to have been the best Korean films released in 2003.