With the historic wins scored by “Parasite” at the 92nd Annual Academy Awards, interest in Korean movies has probably never been higher. If you’re new to Korean film, you may not know where to start or what’s the best film to watch. But don’t worry, there’s good news — there are plenty of great Korean movies.

Diving into South Korean cinema opens a window into the country’s unique point of view shaped by rapid economic growth, technological innovation and the legacy of colonialism and war — while also providing peak entertainment with the national cinema’s talent for storytelling.

1. The Housemaid (1960)

Director: Kim Ki-young

IMDB RATING -7.3/10

STAR CAST – Kim Jin-kyu, Ju-Jeung ryu.                                                                                          

A favourite of Bong Joon ho, this crime flick is a strong shout for being Korea’s greatest ever film. Director Kim Ki-young’s own inspiration came from flicking through a newspaper and stumbling on the story of a family thrown into chaos by the arrival of a domestic helper. The housemaid, played with a mix of coolness and heat by Lee Eun-shim, is the agent of chaos in his take on the tale: an intoxicating watch that tackles class, sexual allure and family dynamics in a way that will be very familiar to Parasite fans.

2. The Wailing (2016)

Genre: Horror

Director: Na Hong-jin

IMDB RATING – 7.4/10

STAR CAST – Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee

A masterpiece of atmospheric horror, The Wailing is long, intense and ambitious, but it never feels like a slog. It also borrows elements from across the landscape of horror – from zombies to demons to creepy kids – but never turns into a messy patchwork. The story, centering on a police officer racing to save a village from a mysterious virus before it can claim his daughter, unfolds gradually enough that it all seems natural, allowing the sense of dread to envelop you like a fog.

3. Parasite (2019)

Genre: Drama

IMDB RATING –8.5/10

STAR CAST- Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong

Director: Bong Joon-ho

A landmark in world cinema, Parasite is the highest-grossing Korean movie in several countries, the first non-English production to win a Best Picture Oscar and universally regarded as one of the best films of the 21st century. All those things are well and good, but Bong Joon-ho’s true achievement was bringing the film’s biting capitalist critique to a global audience.

4. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

Genre: Horror

IMDB RATING – 7.1

STAR CAST – Im Soo-jung, Moon Geun-young, Yum Jung-ah

Director: Kim Jee-woon

This atmospheric horror fable, adapted from a folk story and released on what was a watershed year for Korean cinema (Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder and Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy were released just a few months either side of A Tale of Two Sisters), echoes The Shining in both its intricate setting (a gothic mansion full of looming corridors and William Morris wallpaper) and its chilling atmosphere.

5. Memories of Murder (2003)

Genre: Drama

IMDB RATING –8.1/10

STAR CAST- Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-kyung, Kim Roi-ha

Director: Bong Joon-ho

There are many contenders for the best movie in the Bong Joon-ho filmography, but until Parasite dropped, this thriller was the consensus high watermark. Even now, there are many fans – Quentin Tarantino among them – who’d argue it’s still his finest moment. Revolving around a series of real-life murders that shocked a small town in the ’80s, Memories of Murder twists the police procedural into a potent indictment of a society unequipped to deal with such violence and death.

6. Peppermint Candy (2000)

Genre: Comedy

IMDB RATING –7.6/10

STAR CAST –Sol Kyung-gu, Moon So-ri, Kim Yeo-jin

Director: Lee Chang-dong

Screenwriter Lee Chang-dong’s directorial debut begins with a dishevelled man throwing himself in front of a train. Working backward through his life, the movie shows what led him to that point, in the process tracing 20 years of Korean political history, from Asian financial crisis of the late ‘90s to the 1980 clash between citizens and police known as the Gwangju Massacre. It’s a powerful melodrama with an elegiac tone and a heartbreaking end note.

7. Save The Green Planet (2003)

Genre: Comedy

IMDB RATING-7.2/10

STAR CAST -Shin Ha-kyun, Baek Yoon-sik, Hwang Jeong-min

Director: Jang Joon-hwan

In this zany, genre-bending comedy-fantasy a paranoid beekeeper (Shin Ha-kyun from Sympathy for Mr Vengeance) has kidnapped the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company (Baek Yoon-sik, The President’s Last Bang), convinced that he’s an alien from the planet Andromeda. Inspired in part by Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990), this offbeat cult classic also recalls the sci-fi tinged works of Terry Gilliam in its visuals.

8. Whispering Corridors (1998)

Genre: Thrillers

IMDB RATING –6/10

STAR CAST –Choi Kang-hee, Kim Gyu-ri, Lee Mi-yeon

Director: Park Ki-hyung

South Korean films were subject to heavy censorship during the ’70s, thanks to the country’s authoritarian regime. When the regime fell, it was game on for filmmakers like Park Ki-hyungwho’d been forced to sit on their edgier ideas and could ride a new wave of creativity that supercharged Korean cinema.

9. Joint Security Area (2000)

Genre: Thriller

IMDB RATING – 7.7/10

STAR CAST – Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun, Lee Young

Director: Park Chan-wook

Park Chan-wook’s breakthrough doesn’t have the kinetic energy nor the bloodlust of his later films, but this mashed-up murder mystery-cum-police procedural-cum-political thriller is equally stunning and just as gut-wrenching. After a shooting within the heavily militarised DMZ between North and South Korean leaves a North Korean soldier dead, an army major  is brought in to investigate, and discovers that just about everyone involved is lying, though not for reasons that are immediately obvious .Joint Security Area was, for a time, the highest-grossing film in the country’s history.   

10. The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (2019)

IMDB RATING – 6.9/10

STAR CAST – Ma Dong-seok, Kim Mu-yeol, Kim Sung-kyu

A violent cop and a criminal kingpin – the latter played by Eternals’s Ma Dong-seok – join forces to catch a serial killer on the loose in Seoul. As with the best Korean genre pictures, Won-Tae Lee takes a cookie cutter story and ups the style to such dazzling heights that the clichés warp into something unrecognisable. Full of insane car chases, brutal fistfights and a lot of awesome suits, Sylvester Stallone bought the rights to a potential American remake, which gives you some indication of the class it’s in.

11. Burning (2018)

Genre: Thriller

IMDB RATING –7.5/10

STAR CAST-Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, Jeon Jong-seo

Director: Lee Chang-dong

A master craftsman adept whose filmmaking is underpinned by a total command of mood, Lee Chang-dong is at his formidable best in a slow-burn thriller based on a Haruki Murakami short story, which features a Murakami-esque blend of missing women, lovelorn men, hungry cats and jazz. The alchemy between Lee and the Japanese author’s work seems obvious in retrospect – both love to bend their stories in unpredictable, ambiguous directions.

12. New World (2013)

Genre: Thriller

IMDB RATING -7.5/10

STAR CAST –Lee Jung-jae, Choi Min-sik, Hwang Jung-min

Director: Park Hoon-jung

I Saw The Devil screenwriter Park Hoon-jung’s violent gangster epic feels like a familiar blend of The Godfather and Infernal Affairs. But what it lacks in narrative originality it makes up for in flawless execution. The intricate story of a power struggle within a crime syndicate is brought to life by magnetic performances from Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae, Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, and Hwang Jung-min of The Wailing. Its rich visual signature, meanwhile, is provided by cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, who recently shot Last Night in Soho and Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series. 

13. Silenced (2011)

IMDB RATING – 8/10

STAR CAST -Gong Yoo ,Jung Yu-mi ,Kim Hyun-soo

Director: Hwang Dong-hyuk

After Squid Game’s massive global success, Netflix added a bunch of director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s films to its platform. This powerful courtroom drama starring Gong Yoo (Train to Busan) is the highlight. It’s based on shocking true events that took place at the Gwangju Inhwa School for the hearing-impaired, in which deaf students were systematically abused by staff members. Despite its heavy subject matter, over four million South Koreans flocked to see it at the cinema.

14. Oldboy (2003)

Genre: Thriller

IMDB RATING –8.4/10

STAR CAST -Choi Min-sik

Director: Park Chan-wook

In Korean cinema, there is Before Oldboy and After Oldboy. It’s the movie that drew international attention to the revolution happening in the country’s film industry, and with good reason, and the middle instalment of Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy is an experience completely of its own genre.

15. Right Now, Wrong Then (2013)

IMDB RATING -7.1/10

STAR CAST –Jung Jae,Kim Min-hee,Youn Yuh

Director: Hong Sang-soo

A prolific auteur who specialises in funny, self-reflexive films about movie directors learning awkward life lessons,  Hong Sang-soo may sound like a Korean Woody Allen on paper but has a much more formally playful streak. It’s showcased in this entertaining and radically structured story about a male movie director who falls for a painter he meets while passing the time at a film festival in Suwon. We see their day together once; then we see it all over again, only with slight differences. This cinematic spot-the-difference device not only commands your undivided attention, but gets you thinking about the butterfly effect of tiny details on major moments in life.

16. Io Island (1977)

Director: Kim Ki-young

IMDB RATING – 6.6/10

STAR CAST-Choi Yun-seok ,Kim Chung

Not as well know internationally as The Housemaid, Kim Ki-young’s later murder-mystery has champions including Bong Joon ho and well worth seeking out. There’s something Antonioni-esque about its languid set-up: a rocky outcrop inhabited almost entirely by women divers, where the men are absent. A journalist goes missing, possibly via foul means, and a travel promoter finds himself needing to clear his name. Quickly, the plot leads into folk horror terrain to take in shamanism and the supernatural to offer a penetrating look at Korean male insecurity and a satisfyingly murky viewing experience.

17. The Chaser (2008)

IMDB RATING – 7.8/10

STAR CAST – Kim Yoon-seok ,Ha Jung-woo ,Seo Young-hee

Director: Na Hong-jin

Who you got: the disgraced cop turned pimp or the prostitute-murdering serial killer? Na Hong-jin’s debut feature is a morally ambiguous procedural with no true heroes, but it’s taut and engrossing in a way few American thrillers of the period ever achieved. While clearly indebted to the Park Chan-wook films that invigorated Korean cinema at the start of the decade, the violence is less stylised, resulting in a gritty, realistic actioner which, attitudinally, throws back to the crime dramas of the 1970s.

18. The Handmaiden (2016)

Genre: Drama

IMDB RATING – 8.1/10

STAR CAST – Kim Min-hee ,Kim Tae-ri ,Ha Jung-woo

Director: Park Chan-wook

Park Chan-wook turns Sarah Waters’ crime novel ‘Fingersmith’ into a byzantine and extremely thirsty mystery-thriller that will tie the unfocused in knots. The setting switches from the Victorian London of the book to Japanese-occupied Korea, a change that requires a whole new cargo of cultural specificity that Park delivers in three elegant, sensual parts. It’s a deeply heady tale of conmen, pickpockets, sex, revenge, double and triples crosses – and it may just be Park’s masterpiece

19. Aimless Bullet (1960)

Director: Yu Hyun-mok

IMDB RATING – 7.2/10

STAR CAST –Kim Jin-kyu, Choi Moo-ryong

A pioneering breakthrough for Korean cinema, this downbeat drama about a veteran searching for meaning (and a living wage) in postwar Seoul shook authorities enough that it was banned upon release in 1960. In the years since, the film has come to be seen as a neo-realist triumph. Shot on a meagre budget, amid the rubble of a city still digging itself out from conflict, it tells the story of a depressed soldier trying to make ends meet on an administrative salary so paltry it prohibits him from going to see a dentist about a nagging toothache. It paints a bleak picture of life in post-armistice Korea – abetted by the grimy black-and-white cinematography – while offering just enough hope to keep you from sinking into total despair. 

20. High Society (2018)

Genre: Drama

IMDB RATING – 5.6/10

STAR CAST- Park Hae-il, Soo Ae, Yoon Je-moon

The higher up the social ladder you go, the more you have to climb to protect your place. In this enticing drama about the ultimate power couple, an economics professor husband and his gallery-curator wife embark on an adventure to do whatever it takes to achieve upward mobility and stay there.

21. Midnight (2021)

IMDB RATING – 6.4/10

STAR CAST-Jin Ki-joo,Wi Ha-joon

Loved Squid Game? This 2021 Korean thriller stars Wi Ha-Joon (the actor who played Jun-Ho, the police officer, in the Netflix series) and features an intense, life-or-death storyline about a ruthless serial killer who hunts down a deaf woman through the streets of South Korea. 

22.Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … And Spring (2003)

IMDB RATING –8/10

STAR CAST – Kim Ki-duk

For those who prefer a more sentimental and emotional watch, you won’t regret trying out this beautifully meditative film from 2003. It follows the life of a Buddhist monk living in an isolated floating temple, as each passing season symbolizes a stage in his life.

23.The Villainess (2017)

Genre: Action

IMDB RATING – 6.6/10

STAR CAST – Kim Ok-vin, Min Ye-ji, Shin Ha-kyun

Craving a good Korean action movie? This stylish, exhilarating revenge thriller about a trained assassin on a rampage to escape her past delivers all the high-energy action sequences you could ever want. Just brace yourself for the gore!

24.Train to Busan

Genre: Thriller

IMDB RATING – 7.6/10

STAR CAST-Gong Yoo, Jung Yu-mi

A must-watch Korean thriller film, Train to Busan presents a fresh and original take on one of the most classic film genres — the zombie apocalypse flick — as it follows a man fighting for survival on a speeding train that’s overtaken by a zombie outbreak. Prepare to be on the edge of your seat the entire time while watching this one! 

25.Minari (2020)

Genre: Drama

Director- Lee Isaac

IMDB RATING –7.4/10

STAR CAST – Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri

A tender and stirring drama about a family of South Korean immigrants who take on the American dream in 1980s rural Arkansas, this highly acclaimed film from Korean-American director Lee Isaac Chung received six Academy Award nominations (including for Best Picture!). You’ll probably want to keep a box of tissues handy for this one.