The Day He Arrives Reviews
July 6, 2012
The listless execution may remind you less of 8 1/2 than of Woody Allen's whiny Stardust Memories.
July 5, 2012
Sang-soo Hong has no profound point to pound home. His story doesn't need an ending. He accepts all the characters just as they are.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
April 23, 2012
Hong abstracts the tense network of fragile relationships to crisp, briskly sketched lines that he adorns with bubbly and self-deprecating humor and graceful wonders...
April 20, 2012
Hong offers a strange mixture of magic, mystery, rueful melodrama and dry comedy that's like absolutely nothing else.
April 20, 2012
The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of The Day He Arrives.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
April 19, 2012
The movie becomes an exploration, both playful and rueful, of desire, narrative and the idea beautifully expressed by Faulkner in "Absalom, Absalom!" that "maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished."
Original Score: 4/5
April 19, 2012
Even while The Day He Arrives doesn't come to much-at least not in comparison to some of Hong's other films, such as 2006's brilliant Woman On The Beach-it's still time well spent.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
April 17, 2012
A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives-shot in luminous black-and-white-might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day."
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
April 17, 2012
Hong is wonderful with atmospheric effects, using whirling snowfalls to place his characters' inchoate longing in relief.
April 16, 2012
...maintains a funny and sad focus on its single petulant subject.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
May 24, 2011
The ensemble acting is pitch perfect, and no-frills photography makes Seoul's streets a functional but characterful stage for this subtlest of farces.
May 20, 2011
Serves as an amusing itinerary of dining, drinking and sexual dalliance that beguilingly plays with narrative time.