Making history as the first foreign-language movie to take home the Best Picture award at the Oscars, Bong Joon-ho's 2019 movie Parasite has had a huge cultural impact already and encouraged more people to engage with both world cinema and more left-field dramas and thrillers in general.
If you loved the story of the movie and its execution, and want to see something just as unpredictable and expertly-made, then make sure you check out these 10 other brilliant movies like Parasite.
10 Good Time
This gritty and emotional crime thriller from Josh and Benny Safdie follows Robert Pattinson's would-be bank robber as he loses his developmentally disabled brother to the prison system after a botched job and begins a frantic mission to raise the money for his bail as quickly as humanly possible.
Pattinson's hyperfocused central performance, together with the equally-boundless energy from the presentation and direction of the movie, means that the audience is never quite sure where Good Time is going to go next.
9 Infernal Affairs
Starring Hong Kong movie giants Andy Lau and Tony Leung as two police informers on opposite sides of the war on the mob, Infernal Affairs stunned audiences across the world with its twisting game of cat and mouse as each spy hunts for the other.
It's one of a number of Asian modern classics remade in Hollywood in the 2000s but was thankfully among the more faithful and well-crafted, The Departed becoming the movie that finally earned master filmmaker Martin Scorsese his Oscar for Best Director.
8 Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time
A certifiable modern classic in the vein of Scorsese's own gangster movie creations, Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time follows Choi Min-sik's low-level corrupt customs agent on a journey up through the criminal empires plaguing Busan, South Korea in the 1980s and 90s.
Similarly to a modern crime epic like Breaking Bad, the story may seem cut and dried from the go but it always finds ways to keep the audience on tenterhooks as to how a scene is going to really end up.
7 A Hard Day
Thrillers don't come much more surprising and suspenseful than Kim Seong-hun's A Hard Day. The movie's plot follows a corrupt cop dealing with his mother's funeral and a sudden internal affairs raid on his office when he accidentally hits and kills a man with his car, with all of this only being the very beginning of his incredibly dark, funny, and grueling ordeal.
Though certainly more of an action movie than a drama like Parasite, the story has its own unique tone and more than enough twists and turns to stun the most discerning of film fans.
6 Oldboy
Adapted from the manga of the same name, Park Chan-wook's iconic mystery thriller is a strange, bleak, beautiful, and totally enthralling movie experience that follows a man who's imprisoned for 15 years without explanation only to be suddenly released and challenged to find out why by his elusive captor.
Along with the other two movies in the director's so-called Vengeance Trilogy, Oldboy helped popularize the 21st-century Korean cinema boom in the West, eventually being remade to little fanfare a decade later.
5 Kind Hearts and Coronets
Released just 2 weeks shy of exactly 70 years apart, on different sides of the globe, Kind Hearts and Coronets was, and still is, just as darkly funny and insightful a story about social ladder climbing by any means necessary as Parasite is now.
Following a deceptively-genteel but psychotic man as he exacts an incredibly improbable and murderous plan to reclaim the upper-class title that was denied from him due to the lowly status of his father, this Ealing comedy is both steeped in history and antiquated culture yet still feels decades ahead of its time even today.
4 The Handmaiden
Another movie from director Park Chan-wook, this time a period drama, The Handmaiden is no less of a shocking and beguiling ride as any of the movies in the Vengeance Trilogy.
Centering on an elaborate con involving various layers of seduction and taboo desires, the ever-changing plot all fits together in the end as part of the movie's satisfying puzzle.
3 The Fool
Yuri Bykov's drama follows a young plumber who's called out to inspect a damaged pipe in a rundown housing block. When he arrives, however, he discovers that the building could collapse at any moment onto its hundreds of occupants.
In keeping with the up-and-coming Russian director's running theme of no good deed going unpunished in modern life, the main character's discovery only serves to reveal far more serious structural damage within the morality of his local government and the building becomes the least of anybody's problems.
2 The Last Seduction
One of the more original examples of the neo-noir genre, The Last Seduction ditches any semblance of morality and focuses entirely on having fun.
Linda Fiorentino creates an ice-cold femme fatale for the ages with her lead character as she dodges the attacks of her husband–who she stole $700,000 of drug money from–and manipulates a smalltown wannabe into helping her realize her devilishly perfect master plan.
1 House of Games
Another underrated neo-noir masterpiece, David Mamet's con artist movie sounds like one of the writer/director's plays with its intensely specific dialogue but has all the meticulous good looks of classic Hollywood filmmaking.
A simultaneously straight-talking and deceptive thrill, the story follows a successful psychiatrist who becomes fascinated by a group of confidence men and follows her impulses into their seedy world.
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/3gcdapI
No comments: