"Director: Je gyu Kang"

• Shiri | DVD | (25/08/2003) from £20.23   |  Saving you £-5.24 (-35.00%)   |  RRP £14.99

  A dazzling action movie from South Korea, Shiri follows two South Korean government agents, Ryu and Lee, as they pursue a female super-assassin from North Korea. Meanwhile, an elite paramilitary squad from North Korea has stolen a shipment of CTX, an undetectable liquid explosive of enormous power, which they've planted all over the city of Seoul. As their investigations are successively foiled, Ryu and Lee begin to suspect that there is a mole within the ranks of the agency--and it may be one of them. Both hyperstylish and hyperrealistic, Shiri rips along as a smooth fusion of Hong Kong and American action movies. Ryu's troubled romance with his alcoholic fiancée adds a striking emotional counterpoint to the blazing gunfights and high-speed chases; the ending is unexpectedly moving. It's not surprising that this film beat Titanic's box-office records in Korea. --Bret Fetzer

• Brotherhood | DVD | (24/10/2011) from £15.85   |  Saving you £2.14 (13.50%)   |  RRP £17.99

  A big, bruising epic of the Korean War, Tae Guk Gi or Brotherhood smashed box-office records when it played in South Korea in 2004, almost as though the country needed to re-live the trauma at a 50-year distance. For the rest of the world, this movie looks like a ground-level reckoning in a melodramatic key, with an authentic feel for battle lines as well as home front. It follows two brothers--one uneducated and forceful, the other intellectual and reserved--as they are united and then divided by the conflict. The broadly emotional story has some of the power of tales of the American Civil War, when family members found themselves on opposite sides of a battle. Director Kang Je-gyu , who made the lively female-assassin hit Shiri, takes a blunt approach to the material (including a Saving Private Ryan-style framing device). And at 150 minutes, he has plenty of time for head-splitting, blood-spraying combat. This movie is meant as a punch in the stomach, and it connects. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com