★★★★
"Quiet cine-literate magic from Korean auteur. Shot with pleasing simplicity and an unhurried flow…a subtle portrait of emotional resilience with its female protagonist seeking to remain mindful in the face of life’s transience.’ Hong has carried on, making fascinating, subtle, humane films with the bare minimum…Once again, he casts a tender, sympathetic gaze on a female character
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“A colourful and relatable work that crystallises many of Hong’s best tropes. As always, Hong’s style and form is imperious, with naturalistic conversations captured in organic, free-flowing long takes – creating a transfixing atmosphere in which the actors’ exceptional craft is laid bare.”
James Balmont, Another Magazine
★★★★★
“Packed with emotion and an underlying reflective quality...the film just gives you so much to unpack. Repeat viewing essential. This is another subtle jewel, wise and charming, insouciant yet measured, and somehow squaring the circle between the overwhelming sadness of lost time and the glint of eternity in a passing instant.”
Trevor Johnston, Little White Lies
★★★★
"An ex actress's return to Seoul is beautific and drunkenly raw, in Hong Sangsoo's latest...
Hong takes in the solid geometric strangeness of Seoul's proliferating tower blocks, too, and human awkardness grits the grace. It's pure pleasure to watch his people."
Nick Hasted, The Arts Desk
“A gentle pleasure... a typically meditative study from Korean director Hong Sang. Lee Hye-yeong is mesmerising as a former actor...”
Wendy Ide, The Observer
“Hong’s cinema appears on the surface to be slight, yet there’s something deeply affecting about it. Although it’s set up and staged for the camera, it feels very down to earth and ordinary, just like real life. No other living director of who I’m aware does anything quite like Hong, his films these days are something very special. Like much of Hong’s recent output, this is a film to be cherished.”Jeremy Clarke, Jeremy C Processing.com
★★★★★
"A typically minimalist outing, director Hong’s film is a devastating drama whose affect creeps up on the audience so quietly that it is barely noticeable until after the final blow has landed.
A captivating film of deep emotional power; like weeds slowly cracking the pavement above, its movements in isolation are barely felt but its effects are profound.”
Christopher Machell, Cinevue
★★★★
“Shot with pleasing simplicity and an unhurried flow…a subtle portrait of emotional resilience with its female protagonist seeking to remain mindful in the face of life’s transience."
Tom Dawson, Total Film
“Small is beautiful and luminous in In Front of Your Face (Dangsin-Eolgul-Apeseo), the 11th film of South Korean writer-director Hong Sangsoo to be invited to Cannes…
"Typical of Hong’s work, the laid-back anti-storytelling lets daily life flow slowly by without incident, until a revelatory twist in the last act gives the film its meaning.”
Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter
“The substitution of Chinese liquor for soju is only the most minor change in Hong Sangsoo's latest, subtly different delight...…an unexpected peal of utterly genuine, soul-repairing laughter."
…wonderful, winsome…”
Jessica Kiang, Variety
“Prolific Korean auteur, Hong Sangsoo, delights with his second film of 2021, a poignant and typically minimalist story set beneath the shifting skyline of Seoul.”
"One of Hong's most moving films...a love letter to Seoul and a superb character study of the beatific presence of mind and body with which one woman faces death...tinged with the beauty and sadness of transience."
Becca Voelcker, Sight & Sound
“The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.”
Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine
“Audiences bruised by the pandemic clearly need the escapism of F9 and other tentpoles; but at a time of fragility, they also need reminding of the lambent beauty of our everyday world that Hong delivers here.
"In Front Of Your Face feels as if the director is testing the limits of how far he can pare a story back while retaining an intricate series of echoes, hints and suggestions.”
Lee Marshall, Screen International
“In Front of Your Face" is one of the South Korean director's most open films of late, poignant in its use of a simple structure to touch on the eminently difficult question of how to live happily between past, present and future.”
Elena Lazic, The Playlist
“The great Hong Sangsoo…glories in the power of the cinema. The overwhelming mystery of life in the presence of death inspires Hong to new heights of imaginative inspiration and reveals all the more clearly the essence of his artistry.”"Intimate and fluid...(a) serenely passionate deployment of art as resistance to mortality."
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"One of the very best films from one of the very best filmmakers working today." Joshua Brunsting, Criterion Cast
“One of Hong’s most emotionally generous films. In a career full of small triumphs, it’s a beautiful gesture of family love, of non-specific spiritual awakening, and self-possession meant to create outward waves of goodness. And it comes down to Sangok’s words, repeated throughout, until they take root and grow: “If I can see what’s in front of my face, then I’m not afraid.”
Dave White, The Wrap
"Like a short story, In Front of Your Face makes a lot out of very little. It is a masterclass in economical filmmaking (there are approximately six locations used throughout the film), and a reminder that Hong is not only among the best filmmakers working today, but also simply one of cinema’s greatest storytellers, who can consistently sum up our absurd and incredible human experience in less than 90 minutes." K.F. Watanabe, Screen Slate
“Humble but winning outing from Hong…(an)intimate portrait of an aging movie actress, Sangok (Lee Hye-young) …ends with a fantastic extended restaurant scene between Lee and Kwon Hae-hyo as Jaewon, a director from her past.”
Max Maller, The Chicago Reader
