Critics reviews

Tale of Cinema is a sublime reflection on the cross-pollination of art and life.

When a great filmmaker titles a movie “Tale of Cinema,” it’s a red flag to herald matters of great personal implication. With its immediate drama and its far-reaching vision of untapped possibilities, this movie fulfills that promise.

[Like] in his previous works, Hong unflinchingly ridicules his characters in an almost cruel way. What’s most fascinating about about "Tale of Cinema," though, is that, in Dong-soo, we can see our own relationship with cinema, and come to realize the difficulty in escaping the situation that traps him. Which is to say that, in a sense, we are Dong-Soo.

The first explicit juxtaposition of fiction with reality in Hong’s by now expected bifurcated narrative structure... Tale of Cinema compounds the self-obsession of the Hongian hero by conflating it with the act of both making and receiving cinema itself.

Not only does "Tale of Cinema" introduce Hong’s first use of voice-over, typically viewed as a lazy device – telling, not showing, and all that – but there is also an insistent reliance on the zoom, similarly thought slovenly.

[Tale of Cinema] succeeds both as character study and as a wry meditation both on the relationship between reality and representation and on the passing of time. It’s a delicate film, as discreet in its observations as its predecessors, but no less enjoyable or impressive for all that.

"Tale of Cinema" is not so much a cohesive fable as a meditation on the nature of viewing and perception in relation to the filmic experience itself.

This isn’t just some ordinary tale about art imitating life and vice versa; given the structure of the film and overlapping details, it’s easy and tempting to read it as such, except the film-within-a-film doesn’t provoke Tong-su to imitate its story as much as it opens the floodgates of memory.

[The] film is more than just a clever jeu on reality vs. fiction: With “The Future of Man Is Woman” and now this, Hong appears to be pursuing a warmer, more humanistic path in his career, rather than simply taking time out from weightier movies.

Tale Of Cinema morphs halfway through into a meditation on cinema, love and reality... Though some viewers may find it too oblique, Tale Of Cinema is the work of a director who makes no compromises elaborating an entirely individual style and set of concerns.