Yesterday: Tomorrow Is Looking Doubly Depressing Today

The year is 2020 and two kindred spirits (Kim Seung-woo and Kim Yunjin) raised during the 1980s are having a rough time of it. Consider the headaches, the memory lapses, and their inability to have a sparkling conversation. A desperate, combined search for their father and a serial killer (Choi Min-Su) isn't about to make their lives easier. And despite all the years that have passed for them (and for us), tomorrow looks suspiciously like yesterday. Cops still fire machine guns, fat girls still sing in discos, and everyone still loves their cellphones -- which now come with constant advertising! In this all-too-familiar future, the most screenworthy character is secondary, a tough lady cop named May (Kim Seon-a) who likes to shoot firearms in a short sporty haircut and a tight-fitting leather tanktop. Maybe in some alternate universe, audiences will get to learn her storyline too and movies -- like video games -- will come with multiple plots we can follow and not just the one chosen by director-writer Jeon Yun-su. For today, we were stuck with Yesterday, his middling scifi flick about three siblings drowning in a messed up gene pool. For something more buoyant, check out Jeon's delightful comedy Le Grand Chef.

Shiri: She-bang She-bang

Shiri, Kang Je-gyu's enjoyable political thriller, has a riveting opener: With barely a word of dialogue, an extended montage of shooting, stabbing, screaming, running in the rain, and eating slop introduces us to the dehumanization undergone by a North Korean rebel military outfit. Yet the star pupil of this factional force isn't Pyongyang's answer to Sylvester Stallone; it's Kim Yunjin, the same lovely actress who made a splash stateside with her role in the cult series Lost. To call her character in this film a femme fatale strikes me as missing the point. Such an assertion just cheapens her antiauthoritarian convictions...or the effectiveness of the brainwashing. (That's your call.) But as she kill, kill, kills, she's destined to break as many hearts as she shoots because she can't shed her convictions as easily as her disguising wig. Though this flick has some slow sections before the big shoot-em-up in the stadium, it's also got some unexpected treats like a makeout scene in an aquarium and an excerpt from a Korean production of Guys and Dolls. The light military protection of a newly discovered, scent-free liquid bomb is an improbable plot point but from the looks of the resultant explosions perhaps that material was overhyped.