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William Schwartz

Tomatometer-approved critic
Biography:

I started reviewing South Korean movies in 2012 for HanCinema (www.hancinema.net) following a lifelong interest in film. I have also done extensive research into older South Korean film as well as North Korean films at the Korean Film Archive in Seoul.

Publications:

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
The Long Way Home: Remastered and Expanded (2026) EDIT “The on-the-street and in-the-recording-studio depictions of the time are of greater interest than Grebenshchikov’s own celebrity.” – Book & Film Globe Jan 24, 2026 Full Review Signing Tony Raymond (2025) 82% EDIT “The world of Signing Tony Raymond is not meritocratic. It isn’t even ethical. Just like America, money threatens to pervert everything, but because down-home Americans are good at heart, everything just about works.” – Book & Film Globe Jan 24, 2026 Full Review The Shadow of the Sun (2023) EDIT “The Shadow of the Sun is convincing despite the million reasons it could fail, mainly because it’s a mid-life crisis film except without the wallowing self-centeredness that art about that subject tends to imply” – Book & Film Globe Jan 24, 2026 Full Review We Bury the Dead (2024) 86% EDIT “Unlike typical zombie genre films, We Bury The Dead does not need to put the world at risk for us to care what happens, just Ava. Instead of breadth, it aims for depth — the stake is not human survival but one human’s survival.” – Book & Film Globe Jan 24, 2026 Full Review Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes (1999) EDIT “Funny little behind-the-scenes factoids are what Wadd is focused on rather than providing any broader historical perspective of the industry.” – Book & Film Globe Jan 24, 2026 Full Review Speed Train (2025) EDIT “The ending of Speed Train is a foregone conclusion. The journey is the main appeal here, with cheesy, gory violence and crude fight choreography selling a bunch of one-dimensional archetypes doing their best to survive the train ride.” – Book & Film Globe Dec 8, 2025 Full Review Stitch Head (2025) 71% EDIT “When Stitch Head dares to sit still — when it contemplates how terrifying it is simply to be a child — it comes remarkably close to being a true classic.” – Book & Film Globe Dec 8, 2025 Full Review Lesbian Space Princess (2025) 98% EDIT “It’s borderline brilliant how Lesbian Space Princess is able to skewer fragility culture while still indisputedly being about as queer as a sci-fi comedy can possibly get.” – Book & Film Globe Nov 5, 2025 Full Review Code 3 (2025) 78% EDIT “Did you know that nobody can die in an ambulance? As nonsensical as that sounds, Code 3 does have a good explanation.” – Book & Film Globe Nov 5, 2025 Full Review Driver (2024) 91% EDIT “The first ten minutes of Driver — abstract, sensory, almost experimental — would feel at home in a film festival. But labor is political. A film that avoids structural analysis in favor of isolated anecdotes feels evasive, not neutral.” – Book & Film Globe Nov 5, 2025 Full Review The Truth About Jussie Smollett? (2025) 67% EDIT “One of the big services The Truth About Jussie Smollett does as true crime style retrospective journalism is that it clearly explains all the evidence arrayed against Smollett.” – Book & Film Globe Nov 5, 2025 Full Review Shari & Lamb Chop (2023) 92% EDIT “Leans hard on hagiography while skating over the much weirder, more interesting question: Why was a woman talking to a sock puppet such a compelling figure in 20th-century American television?” – Book & Film Globe Nov 5, 2025 Full Review Ziam (2025) 77% EDIT “Zombie flicks aren’t exactly known for originality, but they usually at least try to be interesting. Even Muay Thai with all of its balletic grace and effective violence isn’t enough of a gimmick to make Ziam watchable.” – Book & Film Globe Nov 5, 2025 Full Review Good Night, and Good Luck Live (2025) 100% EDIT “The play’s quite good, and I would even go so far as to say the telecast is better than the original film.” – Book & Film Globe Nov 5, 2025 Full Review Thank You Very Much (2023) 91% EDIT “The best conceptualization Braverman is able to offer as to why Kaufman is funny is that he was trying to take his audience hostage as they sat mystified, trying to decide whether or not he was actually telling a joke or just being excessively awkward.” – Book & Film Globe Aug 30, 2025 Full Review Cheech & Chong's Last Movie (2024) 87% EDIT “Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie is as much about a bygone era where people conceptualized comedy itself in completely different terms as it is a documentary about Cheech and Chong specifically.” – Book & Film Globe Aug 30, 2025 Full Review Bogotá: City of the Lost (2024) EDIT “It's hard to watch Kook-hee's story unfold with any real sympathy. He's not even very competent at being a gangster.” – HanCinema Aug 6, 2025 Full Review The Priests 2: Dark Nuns (2025) 53% EDIT “A very apt example of smothering its interesting ideas in the service of overly complicated worldbuilding.” – HanCinema Aug 6, 2025 Full Review You Will Die In 6 Hours (2024) EDIT “Adapted from a Japanese mystery novel, You Will Die In 6 Hours renders itself needlessly boring by going out of its way to give the viewer too much information nullifying too many other possibilities.” – HanCinema Jun 21, 2025 Full Review The Third Way of Love (2014) EDIT “It doesn't take long for this romance to get extremely trite and dull.” – HanCinema Jun 21, 2025 Full Review Hidden Face (2024) EDIT “Even the queer ending is oddly believable, because all of these people are just so...weird, in a way that defies clear categorization.” – HanCinema Jun 21, 2025 Full Review Oldboy (2003) 82% EDIT “I don't think I can write in good conscience that this is a bad movie. The camerawork is excellent, as are the performances. There's just not much of a point to it.” – HanCinema Jun 21, 2025 Full Review Searching for the Elephant (2009) EDIT “Weird for the sake of being weird, but in contrast to more typical weird films of this era, writer/director Jeong Seung-goo makes it fairly clear that this weirdness is largely self-imposed.” – HanCinema Jun 21, 2025 Full Review Love in the Big City (2024) EDIT “A wedding isn't a wedding unless the people you platonically love and get impulsive tattoos with are there too” – HanCinema Jun 21, 2025 Full Review Harbin (2024) 89% EDIT “Jung-geun and his compatriots struggle to believe in something, to do something, simply because the alternative is complete despair. And that's no way to live at all.” – HanCinema Jun 18, 2025 Full Review
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