lady vengeance movie review

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Lady Vengeance

P ark Chan-wook is the Korean director who cranked the extreme-dial up to 11 with Oldboy, his ultraviolent movie of obsession and revenge. It was similar in style and substance to his earlier, equally intestine-curdling thriller, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, and now Lady Vengeance repeats the grisly motifs of abduction, imprisonment and retribution - which again originate, interestingly, in the cruelty of school days. It is supposed to complete a "trilogy" of films about revenge, but it could just be the latest in a blood-splattered production line, expanding into a tetralogy or pentalogy: Vengeance Boy, Vengeance Dog, Vengeance Anything. I wouldn't put it past Park to make them all horrifying, and all unspeakably ingenious.

It is a well-worn trope to compare modern violent films and plays to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, with a view to excusing their excesses. Yet Lady Vengeance really does justify this specific comparison. It is a pulp-guignol nightmare, a charnel-house of horror that, though not as immediately scary as Oldboy, builds inexorably to a truly stomach-turning finish, which is then topped off with a chilling coda of considered revulsion that will send you staggering for the exit. And it is managed with such icy self-possession and beady-eyed narrative concentration that the story's potential for absurdity and implausibility vanishes.

Lee Yeong-ae plays Geum-ja, a delicately beautiful young woman who 13 years previously astonished the nation by confessing to a horrendous crime: the kidnap and murder of a five-year-old child. She has been released from prison, now in her early 30s, and over this long time has amassed a new reputation: that of saintly conversion to Christianity. She is a veritable modern Magdalene whose purity surrounds her like an aura. But Geum-ja has a secret - a secret from the news media, from her fellow prisoners and from us, the audience. And the secret begins to unfold when an evangelical Christian group is coldly rebuffed when they greet her at the jail gates with a tambourine-rattling hymn. Geum-ja has spent the time refining a mysterious obsession with the man who used to be her high-school teacher, Mr Baek. He is played, inevitably, by the actor whose extraordinary face has come to symbolise the extravagance of extreme Asian cinema: Choi Min-sik, the avenger from Oldboy, and now the target for righteous anger. His leonine features are made even more disquieting by being slimmed and groomed into that of a respectable pillar of South Korean society.

As Park's story progresses, it is seductively interspersed with flashbacks to our heroine's grim prison life, sharing a minuscule dorm-cell with about half-a-dozen other inmates. Each of them is introduced with name and imprisonment term flashed up on screen and each has a role in Geum-ja's secret apprenticeship in the vocation of payback. Her reveries of violent reprisal happen in a semi-stylised wintry terrain, adjoining a shadowy forest. It's the kind of landscape that looks as if it belongs in a fairy-tale or video game, but actually exists in Geum-ja's past, and is the scene for the awful finale.

Park's Lady Vengeance does not deliver the intravenous frisson of Kill Bill, but it has a sinuous sense of storyline which Tarantino's film lacks: a succession of revelations delayed and motivations explained. His urban locations and semi-fantasised pastoral moments in the snow are all convincingly realised, though there is no serious intent in this "trilogy" to consider revenge in any but the most stylised way. The idea of revenge being messy or futile or counter-productive, as it tends to be in the real world, has not played a serious part. Nor will it, I suspect, in any future adventures. The absence of this consideration is a conscious act, however: it reduces revenge to pure idea, pure motif: like the traces of blood in the opening titles. As drama, Park's vengeance movies have their limits, but as essays in style, and excursions into nightmare, they exert an incredible grip.

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What it's about.

This Park Chan-Wook classic is the third part of a trilogy of films around the theme of revenge, following Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy. While ultimately unique, Lady Vengeance is a thriller set in a prison, in the vein of films such as the Japanese action drama Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion. After being framed and wrongly convicted for murder, our protagonist seeks out the true perpetrator of the crime –– but more than anything else, she seeks vengeance. 

This film’s run time is 115 minutes and every second is essential. There is often gratuitous violence perpetrated by men against women in film, however Lady Vengeance takes back control and for that reason it remains one of my favorite revenge films.

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Review by Byron Ashworth

Lady vengeance 2005 ★★★★½.

Watched Jan 23 , 2024

Byron Ashworth’s review published on Letterboxd:

And with that, we now have a top contender for one of the greatest trilogies of all time. "Lady Vengeance" (2005).

Lady Vengeance isn't just an unbelievable and masterful conclusion to the Vengeance trilogy but also serves as an all-around incredible piece of Park Chan-Wook's filmography. This movie ripped and that's all thanks to the brilliant direction of Park Chan-Wook. The stylish visuals and cinematography are meticulously crafted and with that, the movie just feels so incredibly composed which enhances the storytelling tremendously. I think that the themes of retribution and forgiveness were explored masterfully and another thing Park Chan-Wook does really fucking well is making complex and multi-dimensional characters.

The movie also benefits from some truly awesome performances. Lee Young-Ae and Choi Min-Sik both deliver compelling, complex, nuanced, menacing, and captivating performances adding so much depth and emotion to the overall narrative of the movie. I also think the supporting cast killed their respective roles adding an extra layer to the complexities of the film.

Overall, I think this was another masterful piece of storytelling from one of the greatest international directors and one of the greatest directors of all time in general. An awesome yet complex conclusion to what I'd consider one of the greatest trilogies ever made. I'm giving Park Chan-Wook's 2005 "Lady Vengeance" 4.5/5 stars.

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Lady Vengeance Review

10 Feb 2006

114 minutes

Lady Vengeance

Completing the retribution trilogy launched by Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and continued with 2004’s excellent Old Boy, Park Chan-wook’s latest is a grimly sardonic study of humanity’s capacity for cold-blooded brutality. Yet for all the intricacy of the flashbacking structure and the ingenuity of its use of light, colour and shade, you still won’t be distracted from the story’s flawed psychology. Furthermore, Lee Yeong-ae lacks the emotional range to carry us along with a plan of revenge that begins almost as soon as her former teacher (Old Boy’s Choi Min-sik, who exudes malevolence in what only amounts to a cameo) implicates her in the kidnap and murder of a young boy and then gives away her baby for adoption.

The cod-classical score is superb and there’s plenty of mordant wit, particularly during the sequences detailing the crimes of Lee’s accomplices. However, even though Park handles the insinuated violence with sly expertise, the shift into ensemble melodrama for the lacerating finale is too abrupt to convince, and what could have been an audacious and satisfying coup feels more like a duplicitous sleight of hand.

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Lady vengeance (chinjeolhan geumjassi).

At the age of nineteen, Geum-ja Lee (Yeong-ae Lee, "Joint Security Area") is convicted of the kidnapping and murder of a six year old boy. After fourteen years in an all female prison, where her angelic demeanor has been much commented upon, Geum-ja is released and plots her rebirth as "Lady Vengeance."

Laura's Review: A-

Director Chan-wook Park ("Oldboy") ends his revenge trilogy with a stylish, female centric psychological thriller set to classical music which more often harkens back to the initial outing, "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," than to ultra-violent midsection "Oldboy." The time shifting tale will keep viewers on their toes as clues to what really happened to Geum-ja add up and set the stage for the trilogy's most outrageous comeuppance. The film begins as Geum-ja is released from prison to a choir of Santa Clauses (the bright red and white of the costumes symbolize Geum-ja's two personas) led by the over the top Preacher Jeon (Byeong-ok Kim, "Oldboy"), whose offering of ritualistically 'cleansing' tofu is most harshly rejected. Park flashes back to the media circus which fed upon his heroine's arrest, flits into her surreal and violent dreams then lets the blood flow as Geum-ja begs for forgiveness from her victim's parents by cutting off her finger in their apartment. But Geum-ja's 'crime' is not what it appears, as we will see later when Park revisits her trial when she recreates her crime for horrified observers. First, though, we meet Geum-ja's fellow inmates, one of whom will assist her on the outside and one of whom will really turn her into a killer. Geum-ja saves a woman from the big bull-dyke (Go Su-heui) who rules the roost (Park's flashback to this woman's crime - killing her husband and his mistress, then eating them - is abrupt and blackly humorous, like an outtake from "Kung Fu Hustle."). She cares for a North Korean spy with Alzheimers and befriends a bank robber (Kim Bu-seon, whose crime reenactment is a wildly imagined highlight) whose husband will design Lee's unique double-barrelled gun. Her target? A schoolteacher, Mr. Baek ("Oldboy" star, Min-sik Choi), whom she turned to as a pregnant schoolgirl. After a twisted interlude where Geum-ja gets her daughter, Jenny (Yea-young Kwon), back from Australian adoptive parents (Tony Barry, "Original Sin," and Anne Cordiner), Geum-ja reveals Baek's crimes (in a sequence parents may find very disturbing) and orchestrates her vengeance. Chan-wook Park and cowriter Seo-Gyeong Jeong weave common threads through the revenge trilogy. Vengeance is always on behalf of a child, the crimes more damning as the film's progress. Kidnapping is present in the first and third (we are told that there are 'good kidnappings and bad kidnappings' in both) and teenage pregnancies factor in the second and third. Religion and class are underlying themes in all three and the director uses different points of view in each, refusing, particularly in the first two, to paint his perpetrator and avenger in black and white. It is ironic that "Oldboy," the weakest of the trilogy, is its best known entry. "Lady Vengeance" is the most startlingly visualized (Cinematography by Jeong-hun Jeong "Oldboy," "Three... Extremes") and evokes all register of emotion in the viewer while "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" is the most political and despairing. See all three, but "Lady Vengeance" is a thing of humor and shadows, a unique and mind-blowing treat in and of itself.

Robin's Review: B

A young woman, Geum-Ja Lee (Yeong-Ae Lee), was convicted of child abduction and murder, protecting her accomplice Mr. Baek (Min-Sik Choi), and, because of his betrayal, is sentenced to 13 years in prison. Once inside, she befriends all of the other inmates and takes on the lowliest tasks, securing her their friendship and loyalty as she plots revenge on her betrayer. When she is released, she sets her plan into motion, with the help of her friends, as she becomes Lady Vengeance.” This is the third installment in Korean director Chan-Wook Park’s trilogy of revenge, preceded by Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and the notorious Oldboy” (where the hero/anti-hero actually eats a live octopus). The helmer takes a feminist stance with his latest. Geum-Ja was an impressionable, easily manipulated 19-year old when she was arrested for the heinous murder of their little captive. When interrogated as to why she committed the crime – smothering the boy with a pillow – her only excuse was “I wanted to stop him crying!” The court throws the book at her while Mr. Baek, her former teacher, walks free. To keep her from turning him in for the crime, he has an ace in the hole: he holds Geum-Ja’s baby as a hostage in exchange for her silence about his complicity in the death of the six-year old child. Geum-Ja’s time in stir is used to good stead as she establishes herself as the “kind Ms. Geum-Ja,” showing compassion and the willingness to take on any job – including caring for an elderly, Alzheimer’s-suffering inmate who bestows a valuable document upon her caretaker. The document will prove to be an important tool in Geum-Ja’s plan for revenge. Once released from prison after 13 years confinement she starts the vengeance wheels turning, calling in favors from her friends released from prison. The inexorability of the plan is well told. Lady Vengeance” is a solid finale for Park’s trilogy but is a little confused with its rapid and frequent flash backs and flashes forwards. Without too much by way of linear storytelling I got a little muddled trying to keep the chronologies of the tale straight. But, a fine performance by Yeong-ai Lee as the title Lady keeps things together as the story, by the director and Seo-Gyeong Jeong, paints her plan for revenge in a complicated, compelling way. There is little by way of surprise in the final outcome but getting there is a ride. The poetic nature of the yarn, deftly handled by director Park, shows the Lady’s vengeance in a sentimental light as, while meting out her revenge, she comes to understand the love of those who help her. It took me a couple of times watching “Lady Vengeance” for this to sink in but the result is satisfying in its conclusion. I liked “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” a bit more, though the last chapter of that film was less than the rest. But, the final part of Park’s trilogy is the best rounded of the three. It’s not nearly as gut wrenching or darkly funny as Oldboy” but is also more appealing.

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Film review: lady vengeance (2005).

Arty Flores 07/04/2015 Asian Reviews , Film Reviews

(aka Sympathy for Lady Vengeance)

SYNOPSIS: The final installment of director Chan Wook Park’s revenge trilogy (preceded by Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy) chronicles the efforts of Lee Geum-ja (Yeong-ae Lee) — known to her cellmates as “the kind Ms. Geum-ja” — to track down the man who betrayed her. Taking the rap for her accomplice and incarcerated for 13 long years, she plots an elaborate retribution with help from her fellow inmates.

ALL SHE WANTED WAS A PEACEFUL LIFE….THEY WOULDN’T GIVE IT TO HER. LEE GEUM – JA HAVE MERCY ON US. ” Man, that’s a cool tag line for a film about revenge and a female revenge film at that! Once again much thanks to Mikey for letting me review the three films that make up the trilogy of revenge by Chan – wook Park. It was a pleasure to re – visit OLDBOY and SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE and finally view SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE or as it is known in the U.S., LADY VENGEANCE. But I like all the different titles it goes under. Besides SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE and LADY VENGEANCE it is also known as KIND HEARTED MS. GEUM – JA, which is the literal english translation, MY LADY VENGEANCE, and the ultra cool SHED TEARS FOR LADY VENGEANCE! And I thought the dvd cover was cool looking if a bit understated but some of the other dvd covers I have seen are even cooler! Like the one where she is holding up the gun to her face with a white background, that one is great! And the movie itself?

Okay the plot can be oversimplified. Our Lady Of Vengeance, Geum – Ja, is imprisoned for the abduction and murder of a very young boy and it is a crime she did not commit. She was framed by a Mr. Baek, who I guess was kind of her boyfriend at the time but he got her to take the rap by threatening to kill her daughter, who Geum – Ja had given up for adoption but Mr. Baek said he would find her and kill her. So Geum – Ja languishes in prison all the while plotting her revenge even befriending inmates that she could use after her release to put her plan of revenge into motion. Finally she is released and gets a job in a bakery! Simple enough for ya? Just be prepared for the prison muff diving scene. It is not as erotic or hot as you might think a womens prison cunnilingus scene might be but it is rather humorous for what happens afterwards.

Again, I still say that OLDBOY is the crown jewel in Chan – wook Parks trilogy and I will even throw in that part of the reason for this stems from the fact that OLDBOY is based on a comic and has more action and outlandish ideas, but in a few ways LADY VENGEANCE is a superior film to OLDBOY as well as SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE.

Director Chan – wook Park is constantly evolving into a better film maker and it is plainly evident by watching LADY VENGEANCE. The way he unfolds events and introduces characters by using flashbacks, which there are alot of! But I did not find this confusing and by seeing OLDBOY and SYMPATHY… they prepared me for LADY V. And many of the scenes can only be described as beautiful and I know Park has already made a new film, a vampire movie and it’s hard to believe but I have heard that it is not that good but I have not seen it so the jury is still out.

Yeong – ae Lee, the actress that plays Lady Vengeance is not only a good actress but is supremely gorgeous as well. She has that delicate porcelain doll quality crossed with a 1940’s starlets beauty. Her performance is subdued for the most part with a undercurrent of refined frigidness. She seems like a right cold bitch at first but as the movie unwinds you do start to care about Geum – Ja. Especially after she is reunited with her daughter who had been adopted by a nice Australian family. One more thing that separates LADY VENGEANCE from the other two in the trilogy is that it is alot funnier than SYMPATHY… and OLDBOY, and it is the least violent of the three and again I read more than one review commenting on how violent it is but that it is just not the case. It does have a few bloody parts but it is not the bloodbath some have accused it as.

And another thing! I like LADY VENGEANCE I really do, but I think it is not the best when it comes to films about women taking their revenge, or at the least it is not sleazy, violent, and as mean spirited as the triumverate of the best female revenge which include THRILLER;A Cruel Picture, I SPIT….ON YOUR GRAVE, and MS. 45. I don’t know if it has to do with the time period these films were made in or that with the fact that with these films the theme is these women are getting revenge for being raped or what. Probably a combo of the two but I put LADY VENGEANCE behind these three. And I just gotta say that THRILLER. A Cruel Picture is in my top ten list of greatest movies of all time and if you have not seen it you gotta pick up the dvd! It is truly a must see! There are scenes in LADY VENGEANCE that are spectacularly shot and look like paintings, or computer generated, or video games and I can’t tell how they were done. 

First one is the opening of the film that shows Geum – Ja with bright red eye makeup and pale white face much like the dvd cover and she does look like a vampire and looks stunning with a fragile quality to her. Second is a gorgeous dream sequence but it is very odd with Geum – Ja walking toward the edge of a snow covered cliff pulling what looks like a small rocking horse. But it isn’t a rocking horse. It has the body of a dog and a wagging tail and the head of the man who betrayed her, Mr. Baek, played by Min – sik Choi from OLDBOY by the way. She puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger. Weird! The one that is my favorite is where LADY VENGEANCE is running down a street in slow motion with her arm outstretched; gun in hand with a dark brick or stone wall behind her.

She runs up to one of the bad guys puts the gun right up to his head and blows the dudes brains out! This part looks so cool and gets a rise out of my miniscule schlonger and makes me hungry for more guts! Moreguts moreguts moreguts moreguts! And again here’s where I would usually complain about the lack of violent content but I will refrain and let it go in the case of LADY VENGEANCE. And wait till you see the gun that she uses! It is something she special orders in the movie and it is a ornately carves revolver that has two barrels if I remember correctly and it does look like a weapon that would come out in a Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez movie. 

Really it’s kind of hard to just say, yes, you are going to love LADY VENGEANCE. If you loved OLDBOY but weren’t too thrilled by SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE then the reality is you might not like LADY VENGEANCE to be honest. But I did like it and will watch it again and I liked it better than SYMPATHY… at the time of this writing and I will say that it is almost required viewing to get what the director was trying to accomplish with his trilogy. It doesn’t really matter what order you watch them in though. I would have liked to have seen SYMPATHY…first, then LADY VENGEANCE and saved OLDBOY for last.

So overall LADY VENGEANCE is a really good film, definitely one of the best Korean films I have seen and if you got swept up into the OLDBOY and vengeance whirlwind you would do good to leave yourself open and not fight it and you will enjoy it.

Get Old Boy, Lady Vengeance and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance in the new Vengeance Trilogy set from Amazon

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FILM REVIEW

With 'Lady Vengeance,' Park Chanwook Completes a Trilogy, a Bit More Restrained

By Nathan Lee

• April 28, 2006

No animals were harmed in the making of "Lady Vengeance." This may come as a disappointment to devotees of Park Chanwook, the controversial Korean director of "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" and "Oldboy." Relatively restrained, at least by the hysterical standard of its predecessors, the concluding chapter of Mr. Park's "vengeance trilogy" is a kinder, gentler exercise in empty virtuosity. And it raises a critical new question about this much-discussed filmmaker: Which has grown more tiresome, the debate surrounding his intentions or the movies he makes?

The issue of whether Mr. Park is a serious artist or a solipsistic showoff ought to have been settled by "Cut," his tacky, pretentious, monstrously tedious contribution to the omnibus film "Three Extremes." But the line still stretches back to "Oldboy," his prizewinning exercise in steroidal pulp fiction.

As you'll recall if you saw it -- and who could forget? -- one of the first things the hero of that film did after escaping from years of imprisonment was to stop by a sushi joint and sink his teeth into a live, exceedingly distressed octopus. Repellent from an animal-rights perspective but as compelling an image as you'll find in recent movies, the Octopus Scene remains the quintessential Park provocation, the ugly apex of his adolescent oeuvre.

Nothing in the new movie pushes buttons that hard or collapses so many ideas, both daring and dubious, into a single savage image. Always full of hot air, Mr. Park appears to have run out of steam. Like a shark, or Lars von Trier, he needs to keep moving forward, constantly upping his own ante, or he's dead in the water.

His fatigue can be seen in the lazy repetition that gives us another victim of wrongful imprisonment, Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), newly released and crazed on revenge. In confessing to the murder of a young boy, she took the fall for the real killer, a schoolteacher played by "Oldboy's" Choi Min-sik.

In one of a hundred arbitrary plot details, he forced Geum-ja's hand by kidnapping her daughter. On finishing her prison term, she reclaims the child, who was adopted by a goofy Australian family, and sets to conspiring a nasty death for her nemesis with the help of former cellmates.

Along the way, under the moronic pretext of testing a gun, she blows the head off a puppy. Relax, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, it happens off screen. Relax, People for the Delectation of Extreme Asian Cinema, there is plenty of visible atrocity. Men are tortured, women are raped, and children in snuff videos scream in terror as their anguished parents are forced to watch.

This last bit of business kicks off a Grand Guignol finale that might have expressed an idea instead of an attitude had it any traction in the real world or exhibited the internal logic of a delirious contrivance like Brian De Palma's "Femme Fatale." This is the gist of Mr. Park's irrelevance as anything but a stylist, and a facile one at that. His puppet people and phony plots are an excuse for rhetorical showboating, neither a source of human value nor the medium of legitimate ethical inquiry.

That's why the story of "Lady Vengeance" is such a convoluted hodge-podge of time frames, subplots and bit player back stories. That's why Geum-ja's ordeal elicits no sympathy. That's why the ending is trite, not transgressive. And that's why Mr. Park's much-lauded formal chops -- skewed perspectives, elegant symmetries, swaggering camera work and digitally enhanced edits -- just don't cut it.

"Lady Vengeance" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The animals get off easy this time, but the humans are in for all kinds of rape, beating and torture.

Lady Vengeance Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed by Park Chanwook; written (in Korean, with English subtitles) by Chung Seo-kyung and Mr. Park; director of photography, Chung Chung-hoon; edited by Kim Sang-bum and Kim Jae-bum; music by Choi Seung-hyun; martial arts director, Kwon Seung-ku; production designer, Cho Hwa-sung; produced by Lee Tae-hun and Cho Young-wuk; released by Tartan Films. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 111 minutes.

WITH: Lee Young-ae (Lee Geum-ja), Choi Min-sik (Mr. Baek), Oh Dal-su (Mr. Chang), Kim Si-hu (Geun-shik), Lee Seung-shin (Park Yi-jeong) and Kim Bu-sun (Woo So-young).

Lady Vengeance (South Korea, 2005)

Lady Vengeance is the conclusion of South Korean director Park Chan-wook's "Revenge Trilogy." (The other two episodes: 2002's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and 2003's Oldboy .) Over the span of three films, Chan-wook has examined many aspects of the concept of revenge, including the most lasting: consequences. For many movies, the act of retribution is the point of the film. For Chan-wook, it's the starting point for a larger tapestry.

Lee Geum-ja (Lee Yeong-ae) has just been released from prison and is determined to exact revenge upon the man who put her there. Not only did jail steal years from her life, but Geum-ja was forced to give up her baby daughter for adoption. Now, calling in favors owed to her by other prisoners, she executes a complicated scheme that will re-unite her with her daughter and settle her score. Then she learns a terrible, and unexpected, truth. Revenge, while it may be just, turns out to be more bitter than sweet.

The first hour of Lady Vengeance unfolds like a mobius strip, skipping randomly through time and occasionally doubling back on itself. Patience is necessary; eventually the pace slows enough for us to catch up. There is a shift in tone during the second half as Lady Vengeance turns into a meditation on the ethics of revenge, and the question of whether we ever see things clearly enough to argue that "the end justifies the means." Anyone who has enjoyed the filmmaker's previous works, especially Oldboy (which received enough of a widespread U.S. distribution to become a cult movie), will appreciate what this film has to offer. I liked it, but a word of a caution to would-be viewers: Lady Vengeance contains violence (some extreme), but it is not an action film. It is deliberately paced, allowing the audience to have time to reflect upon what's happening. And the comedy is of the gallows variety.

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Lady Vengeance review

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The third instalment in Park Chan-wook's rampant revenge trilogy isn't exactly fresh. From the first two films, themes of kidnapping (Sympathy For Mr Vengeance) and imprisonment (Oldboy) recur. From Kill Bill, there's the majestically angry mother motif. Elsewhere, references range from women-in-prison flicks to femme-revenge outings such as Ms. 45 and Lady Snowblood, particularly as this impeccably stylish Lady's red-on-white opening titles parallel Snowblood's visual influence on Tarantino's Samurai-chick flick.

But it's to Park's credit that his Lady remains her own woman. Expecting Tarantino's bludgeons of blood? Hammer-time, Oldboy-style? Wrong film. This time, Park aims to pinpoint the ambiguities of a redemption sought through revenge, totting up the price of penitence via the tricky tack of what the act of vigilantism does to the vigilante. It's sombre, searching stuff and its aching sadness is acutely contained within Lee Young-ae's internalised performance.

Fans of Park's other maelstroms of mischief-hued mayhem won't feel short-changed, mind. He doesn't hold off on his highwire hoofing between horror and black humour, sensational style and substance. The fast, fizzy first half is a masterpiece of montage, flashing back and forward at full-pelt between Lee Geum-ja's life in and out of prison. When her righteously wicked plot begins, Park shows little up-front, but amplifies the aura of off-screen horrors. Similarly, Oldboy himself, Choi Min-sik, creates a vivid study in venomousness from very little that you actually see.

Bravura filmmaking? And then some. Still, it's tough to shake the suspicion that the tension between Park's flourishes and themes isn't always as productive or exciting as hoped for. One sniggersome sight-gag in the climactic sequence detracts from the film's chunkier exploration of how revenge can sap a soul and revels perhaps a little too readily in the sensationalist subject Park purports to probe - and when you'd be better off just surrendering to the punky, punchy and pell-mell mix of moods and methods, is all this wrestling with intricate plot worth the trouble anyway? Contrasted with Cronenberg's similarly themed but more cunningly implicatory A History Of Violence, Lady's excesses are its own worst enemy.

But if Park's film about the difficulty of pure redemption doesn't come easy, it does cut a sleek, vicious dash, dressed up in Geum-ja's mourning. Dwelled on for, ooh, 13 years, the pieces of its devilish design may well plop into place. The same goes for Park: given the increase in emotional resonance between Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, the parts of Park that seem capable of making a truly tremendous five-star film feel inches away from clicking.

See it anyway. You certainly won't be stuck for things to stew on afterwards.

Not quite a devastating pay-off to his revenge trilogy, but Park Chan-wook's lethal Lady still means business and goes about it in rich, slick style.

The Total Film team are made up of the finest minds in all of film journalism. They are: Editor Jane Crowther, Deputy Editor Matt Maytum, Reviews Ed Matthew Leyland, News Editor Jordan Farley, and Online Editor Emily Murray. Expect exclusive news, reviews, features, and more from the team behind the smarter movie magazine. 

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LADY VENGEANCE

"ill bill korean style".

What You Need To Know:

(PaPaPa, ABAB, C, B, LL, VVV, SS, NN, A, D, M) Very strong mixed pagan worldview with some anti-Christian content regarding a Christian preacher who offers salvation to the heroine but sells her out for money when she rebuffs his evangelism, as well as mother looks after her daughter with affection and tenderness; about 15 obscenities and profanities; very strong sometimes gory violence includes implied murder of children and adult, kidnapping of children, beatings, shootings, poisonings, and stabbings using knives, scissors and axes; implied heterosexual and lesbian adult sex, and consensual sex of adult with teenager; brief sexual nudity; alcohol use; smoking tobacco; and, revenge.

More Detail:

Kill Bill Korean Style

TITLE: LADY VENGEANCE

Quality: * * * * Acceptability: -4

SUBTITLES: — In Korean with English subtitles —

WARNING CODES:

Language: LL

Violence: VVV

RELEASE: April 28, 2006

TIME: 112 minutes

STARRING: Yeoung-ae Lee, Min-sik Choi and Yea-young Kwong

DIRECTOR: Chan-wook Park

PRODUCERS: Young-wuk Cho, Chun-yeong Lee, Tae-hun Lee

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Miky Lee

WRITERS: Seo-Gyeong Jeong and Chan-wook Park

DISTRIBUTOR: Tartan USA

CONTENT: (PaPaPa, AbAb, C, B, LL, VVV, SS, NN, A, D, M) Very strong mixed pagan worldview with some anti-Christian content regarding a Christian preacher who offers salvation to the heroine but sells her out for money when she rebuffs his evangelism, as well as mother looks after her daughter with affection and tenderness; about 15 obscenities and profanities; very strong sometimes gory violence includes implied murder of children and adult, kidnapping of children, beatings, shootings, poisonings, and stabbings using knives, scissors and axes; implied heterosexual and lesbian adult sex, and consensual sex of adult with teenager; brief sexual nudity; alcohol use; smoking tobacco; and, revenge.

GENRE: Crime Thriller

INTENDED AUDIENCE: Adults

REVIEWER: Joseph L. Kalcso

The title character in LADY VENGEANCE, a crime thriller from South Korea, is the sweet Geum-ja Lee (Yeoung-ae Lee). Geum-ja can be as cold and ruthless as she is beautiful. She takes the fall for the murder of a 6-year-old child and winds up in jail for 13 years to pay for this heinous crime. During those long years, not only her youth but also whatever little vestige of innocence she might have had is forever lost, and for that her self-pity threatens at times to overwhelm her. On the flipside, she redeems the time well by methodically planning sweet revenge against Mr. Baek (Min-sik Choi), the real killer. She even manages to get some practice by unfeelingly doing away with an evil and oppressive cellmate (Shi-hu Kim) who sexually, and otherwise, abuses anyone who comes within her reach.

Geum-ja eventually earns the dual reputation of being both an Angel, and a Witch, and is even aided by her admiring cellmates with some of the tools and resources she will need to accomplish her determined post prison goals. On the day of her release, Geum-ja finds herself torn between a nagging desire to make a clean start, and her mission of revenge. As she walks out into the bright sunshine, and freedom, a fawning preacher (Beyong-ok Kim), accompanied by a small band of musicians wearing comical Santa Claus outfits, greets her. Their leader, a preacher brimming with joy, presents her with a gleaming white tofu cake symbolizing spiritual cleansing, and a new beginning. Geum-ja promptly slaps the cake to the ground, clearly signaling to everyone the path that she has chosen.

Later, she commissions a carefully crafted handgun to be built while at the same time confectioning delicate cakes at a local bakery. She tenaciously hunts the object of her pent-up hatred, while at the same time looking after her 13 year old daughter Jenny (Yea-young Kwong) with colossal tenderness and affection. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this movie is observing precisely this duality of mind and purpose, which the anti-heroine carries with her all the way down to the final scene.

LADY VENGEANCE is the third rendition of director Chan-wook Park’s movie trilogy exploring the subject of vengeance. The movie succeeds on two significant levels. Director Park undoubtedly has an eye for striking static photography, which at times looks more like a series of stills to be presented in an art gallery than in a motion picture: beautiful to regard, occasionally intriguing, and often compelling. On another successful plane, this movie hits its audience straight between the eyes with the subject of revenge, which escapist, superficial exercises like the KILL BILL movies never did. Neither is there any getting away here from the questions it seriously poses. Could revenge ever be a viable option, is it acceptable, or even required? Who could, or should, carry it out, and when, if ever?

Setting the answers aside, LADY VENGEANCE regrettably fails in many more ways than it succeeds. Its over-the-top excessive use of gory violence, sordid and often depraved sex, and general all-around human debauchery goes a long way to negate all the positive elements initially brought to the plot. All the performances, including that of the fragile, and yet hard as steel, Geum-ja, the amoral, despicable killer Mr Baek, and Jenny as the loveable daughter brought up by Australian step-parents, are thoroughly professional, but not much more than that. Most objectionable of all, however, is the way religious elements are depicted by the director. The Preacher is the only character with any sort of religious faith in the movie, and he is portrayed as a feeble minded hypocrite, who, when spurned by Geum-ja, in a veiled allegory to the apostle Judas, betrays the object of his love for a meager sum of money. Moreover, director Park either completely ignores, or is ignorant, of God’s admonition to man on the subject of vengeance which clearly states in Romans 12:19 of the Holy Bible, “Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto the wrath of God, for it is written, vengeance belongs to me, I will recompense, says the Lord.”

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Lady of Vengeance

1957, Crime/Drama, 1h 13m

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Lady of vengeance   photos.

When publisher William Marshall (Dennis O'Keefe) learns his young ward Melissa Collins (Eileen Elton) has committed suicide, he sets in motion a plan to murder the man who drove her to kill herself. Mistakenly believing that singer Larry Shaw (Vernon Greeves) is his intended target, Marshall unwittingly seeks help from the man who actually broke Melissa's heart, criminal Emile Karnak (Anton Diffring). When Marshall learns the truth, however, he turns his efforts toward Karnak instead.

Genre: Crime, Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Burt Balaban

Release Date (Streaming): Sep 1, 2016

Runtime: 1h 13m

Production Co: Princess Production Corporation

Cast & Crew

Dennis O'Keefe

William T. Marshall

Katie Whiteside

Anton Diffring

Patrick Barr

Inspector Madden

Eileen Elton

Melissa Collins

Vernon Greeves

Burt Balaban

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Lady Vengeance ( 2005)

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Lady Vengeance  is a 2005 South Korean  psychological thriller  film directed by  Park Chan-wook . [3]  The film is the third and final installment in Park's  Vengeance Trilogy , following  Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance  (2002) and  Oldboy  (2003). It stars  Lee Young-ae  as Lee Geum-ja, a woman released from prison after serving the sentence for a murder she did not commit. The film tells her story of revenge against the real murderer.

The film debuted on 29 July 2005 in South Korea, and competed for the Golden Lion at the  62nd Venice International Film Festival  in September 2005. While it failed to win in competition, it did walk away with Cinema of The Future, the Young Lion Award, and the Best Innovated Film Award in the non-competition section. It won the award for Best Film at the 26th  Blue Dragon Film Awards . The film had its US premiere on 30 September 2005 at the New York Film Festival. It began its limited release in North American theatres on 5 May 2006, to favorable reviews from critics.

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"Vengeance" sounds like the title of an action thriller. There have been films with that name before. But although vengeance is discussed in "Vengeance"—the first feature from writer/director/star B.J. Novak, co-star and co-writer of the American version of "The Office"—it has a lot more on its mind. Too much, probably. 

The story begins in earnest when New Yorker writer and aspiring public intellectual Ben Manalowitz (Novak) gets a call at his Manhattan apartment late one night from Ty Shaw ( Boyd Holbrook ), who lives in one of the flattest backwaters in West Texas, a small town five hours' drive from Abilene, which is two hours and forty minutes from Dallas. Ty is calling to tell Ben that his sister, Ben’s girlfriend—who is oddly also named Abilene, Abby for short—has died. 

Ben doesn't have a girlfriend named Abby. He's a player who hooks up with many women. But a quick check of his phone confirms that he did indeed have sex with an aspiring singer named Abby ( Lio Tipton ) a few times and then forgot about her. Somehow he ends up letting himself be talked into traveling to Abby's hometown, attending her funeral, and commiserating with her grieving family, which also includes her younger sisters Paris ( Isabella Amara ) and Kansas City ( Dove Cameron ), her kid brother El Stupido (Elli Abrams Beckel), and her mother Sharon (J. Smith-Cameron). Then Ty tells Ben that Abby was murdered, probably by a Mexican drug dealer named Sancholo ( Zach Villa ), and asks if he'll help the family seek, well, you know.

Ben is a narcissist who seems to view every relationship and experience as a way of raising his status as a writer and quasi-celebrity, so it seems unbelievable at first that he'd travel to Texas to attend the funeral of a woman he didn't really know. But the notion begins to seem more plausible once he starts talking to the family and slotting them into his prefabricated East Coast media-industrial-complex notions of "red state" and "blue state" people, and spinning his theories about temporal dislocation. Modern technology, he says, allows every person to exist in every moment except the present if they so choose. The desire for vengeance, we are told, is exclusively a backward-looking urge.

Intrigued by the possibility of writing the equivalent of a great American novel in the form of a podcast (he even name-checks Truman Capote's In Cold Blood ) Ben decides to stick around to gather material for an audio series, which will be created under the supervision of his friend Eloise, a New York-based podcast editor for a National Public Radio-like organization. (As Eloise, Issa Rae works wonders with a thinly written role.)

If Ben’s creative vision sounds like the kind of navel-gazing blather that you'd hear on a true crime podcast in which an actual person's murder becomes a springboard for brunchy rumination on law and truth and the nature of yadda yadda  by a group of Ivy League college graduates based in Brooklyn, well, Ben is aware that he's sliding towards that cliché—and so is Eloise, who early on makes a joke to the effect that Ben is the only white man in America without a podcast. And yet, true to media form, they embrace the templates, tropes, and clichés anyway. 

Unfortunately, so does the movie. Like "The Daily Show" and its many imitators—and like Jon Stewart's recent film " Irresistible "—this is a movie that chastises its protagonist and the "red state" people he engages with for failing to look beyond the clichés they're fed by their own self-enclosed media loops, while at the same time dining out on them. On one side of the great divide is a nation of "coastal elites" (driven by Harvard-educated Jewish people like Ben) who name-drop cultural tidbits that they learned in college and never revisited; sneer at monogamy, and think everything between the coasts that's not a Top Ten city is a barbaric wasteland. The inhabitants of said wasteland are people whose favorite restaurant is Whataburger and have several guns in the house for every person (including the kids) and use them to settle their differences rather than calling 911. 

Intriguingly, though, even as "Vengeance" checks box after box on the op-ed chart of American shorthand, it also presents a number of characters with idiosyncrasies and layers that we've never seen in a movie before. Ben himself is quite a piece of work, and it's to Novak's credit that we eventually dig past Ben's buzzwords and NPR-ready voice and see the character's self-loathing (and, it would appear, the filmmaker's) at realizing that he's a prisoner of the same limited thinking he decries. (Ben often plays more like the protagonist of a French comedy than an American one—or like the characters played by Canadian satirist Ken Finkleman in "The Newsroom" and "More Tears.") There's little discussion of racial grievance as a motivation for politics in the film, and nobody mentions Trump, Greg Abbott, or the transformation of Texas into an authoritarian nation-state. The movie takes the audience into a minefield but tactfully declines to point out most of the mines. But these threats lurk under the surface, and they do occasionally explode—particularly when the drug epidemic that's decimating white middle-America comes to the forefront of the story.

The supporting cast boasts a number of characters who seem one-note during their introductions but quickly assert their spiky individualism. Smith-Cameron seems underutilized at first, but becomes the emotional anchor of Ben's story, and her final scene is powerful. There are several terrific scenes involving Abby's onetime record producer Quinten Sellers, kind of a Phil Spector of West Texas who lives and works in a combination home, studio, and cult compound, and regales his talent and hangers-on with monologues about time, space, individuality, art, drugs, and hedonism that Marlon Brando or Dennis Hopper might have delivered in a 1970s American art film. Sellers is played by  Ashton Kutcher in what might be a career-best performance. With his polite but eerie intensity, ten-gallon white cowboy hat, and lanky frame, it's as if Sam Shepard had come back to play Col. Walter Kurtz.

Novak is a thoughtful writer with a lot of things to say about the United States of America in the year 2022. The problem is that he seems determined to say all of them in one feature film. The result is a jumbled, fitfully amusing, occasionally fascinating effort, but one that shows promise even when it's stumbling over its ambition and falling prey to some of the same stereotypes about "red" and "blue" (or reactionary and progressive) America that it keeps intimating that Americans need to get beyond. The first 15 minutes are borderline awful, but the movie gets better and more surprising as it goes, and the final act is impressive in its determination not to give the audience what it wants. Novak is famous enough that he could've cobbled together an onanistic two hours of nothing and still gotten into South by Southwest with it, but he decided to try to make a real movie. 

Now playing in theaters.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

Vengeance (2022)

Rated R for language and brief violence.

B.J. Novak as Ben Manalowitz

Boyd Holbrook as Ty Shaw

J. Smith-Cameron

Dove Cameron as Kansas City

Ashton Kutcher

Isabella Amara as Paris

Cinematographer

• Lyn Moncrief
• Plummy Tucker
• Hilda Rasula
• Finneas O'Connell

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This Japanese Actress Inspired Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’

Get to know the stylish icon of Japanese exploitation cinema, whose work remains as visionary and remarkable as the films she inspired.

The Big Picture

• Meiko Kaji, a talented actress and singer, starred in iconic Japanese films like Lady Snowblood and Female Prisoner Scorpion .
• Her impact on cinema can be seen in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill , which pays homage to Kaji's work through narrative and style.
• Despite challenges, Kaji's legacy is being preserved by dedicated fans and film preservationists for future generations to appreciate.

If you are a fan of Kill Bill , the two-part martial arts revenge epic from director Quentin Tarantino , you may not recognize the name Meiko Kaji , but you have heard her voice. Near the end of the climactic fight between The Bride, played by Uma Thurman , and Lucy Liu's deadly O-Ren Ishii, a song begins to play. This song is the theme from Toshiya Fujita 's Lady Snowblood , a 1973 Japanese revenge film starring Kaji. She performs the theme herself, as Kaji is a talented singer in addition to her ability as an actress. The influence of Kaji's work in Lady Snowblood can be traced directly to Kill Bill , which has overt musical and visually stylistic homages to the film, as well as a narrative that is strikingly similar. So who is Meiko Kaji in the larger context of Japanese cinema?

She may not be a household name in America, but beginning with her first lead role in Blind Woman's Curse , Kaji starred in sixteen movies from 1970 to 1974. Among these were two Lady Snowblood features, four in the Female Prisoner Scorpion franchise, and five entries in a series called Stray Cat Rock . These are movies that were popular among younger audiences in Japan at the time, and they continue to find new life in America through artists like Tarantino shining a light on their legacy.

Kill Bill Vol. 1

After awakening from a four-year coma, a former assassin wreaks vengeance on the team of assassins who betrayed her.

Meiko Kaji Slashed Her Way to Stardom

Before Lady Snowblood , Kaji made waves in the exploitation genre through her work in Stray Cat Rock and Female Prisoner Scorpion . Stray Cat Rock contained five films (two of which share the same director as Lady Snowblood ) which followed young women experiencing night-life in Japan, getting into conflict with street gangs, and engaging in criminal activity intended to disrupt the political or social status quo. The series was first intended to be a starring vehicle for singer Akiko Wada , but Kaji's character was so beloved that in every film after the original that Kaji held the lead role and was the primary focus of the marketing. These movies have a punk sensibility and a vibrant style which makes them fun and exciting to watch. Kaji leads a rotating cast of young women in fights against bikers, racist gangs, and oppressive law enforcement officers. They feature many montages dedicated to underground Japanese culture, showcasing live music, and performance art from a variety of talented young artists.

Female Prisoner Scorpion began while Stray Cat Rock was still an ongoing series, and follows Kaji over four films as a revolutionary figure disrupting an abusive prison system. The Female Prisoner Scorpion series almost plays out like a hard, brutal R-rated version of Paul Newman 's Cool Hand Luke , as Kaji inspires her fellow prisoners to challenge the system and fight for their rights. These films are quite violent, and occasionally feature content relating to sexual crimes, so they are certainly not for everyone, but Kaji's strong resolve and brutal dispatching of anyone who has ever stood in her way or brought her harm is empowering, and the films are beautifully constructed.

Quentin Tarantino Honors Meiko Kaji With ‘Kill Bill'

The similarities between Lady Snowblood and Kill Bill are easy to spot with only a fraction of familiarity with each movie. Both follow a scorned assassin seeking revenge against criminals who are at the center of a brutal trauma the protagonist must reckon with. Tarantino's film cribs lovingly from many classic tropes of old martial arts and samurai films, and Lady Snowblood is a perfect exemple of the strength of this kind of movie. Lucy Liu' s character in Kill Bill Vol. 1 sports a similar aesthetic in terms of wardrobe and weaponry, while Uma Thurman 's character has a plot line that creates many clear parallels between herself and the character of Lady Snowblood. Tarantino has been on the record about how his influences are overtly seen through direct references in his work , and when interviewed for Screenwriter's Monthly while promoting Kill Bill Vol. 2 , he spoke about Kaji's influence, specifically citing Female Prisoner Scorpion and Lady Snowblood since both feature "hell-bent for revenge characters."

Quentin Tarantino’s Real First Film Was Lost in a Fire (or Was It?)

The unfortunate reality for the longevity of films like Kaji's in the modern era is that many audiences still will not give foreign or subtitled films much of a chance, and on top of that, they can be difficult to find. Luckily the Stray Cat Rock and Female Prisoner Scorpion films have all been restored and released on physical media by Arrow Video, while the two Lady Snowblood movies are available together on DVD and Blu-Ray in the Criterion Collection . The efforts of film preservationists and super fans like Tarantino have allowed for an actress like Kaji to live on in an iconic cult status. However, there is something bittersweet about how Kill Bill , the story which takes so much inspiration from her work, is known by so many more people than the stylish and beautiful films which paved the way for Tarantino's work to become a massive success.

Kaji is still active in the acting community, with many TV credits over the last decade including a supporting performance in the acclaimed 2020 drama Under the Open Sky and 2023's YuYu Hakusho live-action adaptaion. Much of her work is worth visiting, but anyone who loves Tarantino's films owes it to themselves to become acquainted with the period of her career that spanned Stray Cat Rock 's first entry to Lady Snowblood 's sequel, Love Song of Vengeance . The stardom Kaji achieved in Japan is hard to see replicated in America, where action films are still primarily male-dominated. Kaji showed no mercy on the screen and portrayed a variety of distinguishable, strong female protagonists who took their agency and their fate into their own hands. It is no wonder she will remain an icon of Japanese cinema for as long as people have access to her work, which is hopefully forever.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 is currently streaming on Netflix in the U.S.

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Review: In ‘The People’s Joker,’ an iconic villain is co-opted for sly trans expression

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The first lines that greet viewers of Vera Drew’s gonzo new film, “The People’s Joker,” are a necessary disclaimer meant to assure audiences (and whatever legal departments at various corporations may be watching) that this passion project was never intended to infringe on any known copyright. Later, a logo of the film will more specifically make this point. It labels Drew’s wildly inventive take on everyone’s favorite Batman villain as “a fair-use comic-book parody/trans autofiction.” But much like Drew’s fictional alter ego, a wannabe comedian-slash-villain living in Gotham City coming into her own, the beauty of this DIY project is found in that slash, in the infinite possibility opened up by bridging two things (be they gender or genre) and creating something altogether dazzling and new.

Drew , who co-wrote the script (with Bri LeRose), edited, directed and stars in “The People’s Joker,” is clearly aping the trappings of the self-serious superhero origin story. The kind that found its zenith in Todd Phillips’ 2019 take on Batman’s clownish foe. And indeed, there’s a way of seeing Drew’s own take on this “Joker the Harlequin” as a playful middle finger to such dour depictions of a character whose first live-action iteration was in the campy hands of Cesar Romero. “Why so self-serious?” the film winks at every turn.

The moment we first meet Drew’s Joker, backstage as she waits to go on camera for a comedy show, is meant to evoke Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning performance. She’s donning Phoenix’s now iconic red clown suit. She’s made up in similar makeup. And she seems just as wary of what she’s about to do when she steps on set.

But just as quickly as Drew has encouraged us to connect her project with that other Joker, she asserts how deftly she’s about to reframe such a comparison. In this version, her Joker is a trans girl who’s grappling with childhood trauma and some unresolved gender identity issues. More tellingly, she is driven to pursue a career in comedy. Except in this world, comedy is only allowed at the “UCB Live” show, an “SNL” parody that’s sanctioned by Batman (a pot-bellied animated hero voiced by Phil Braun) and run by Lorne Michaels (a Sims-like CGI figure voiced by Maria Bamford).

This Joker, then, is waging a war against comedy. Or rather, against the comedy that’s allowed to be broadcast to mainstream audiences. The “anti-comedy” troupe she assembles with her friend Penguin (Nathan Faustyn) looks uncannily like a who’s who of well-known Gotham dwellers, including a sly cat burglar, a mouth-guarded muscle man and an ivied plant-human hybrid.

Drew isn’t subtle in wanting to puncture the insidious claim that women, trans folks and any and every minority — not to mention zoomers writ large — have killed comedy. And so, amid this unique version of Gotham City, her Joker finds her own villain origin story in wanting to break into a comedy boys’ club.

As she hones her routine (and her fashion sense, borrowing from various iconic Joker looks over the years), Drew’s protagonist falls madly in love with “Mr. J” (Kane Distler), a trans stand-up whose green slicked-back hair, white makeup and “damaged” forehead tattoo aren’t enough of a red flag for her to care. Instead, she becomes enamored with Mr. J, whose backstory with their shared Bat-foe turns this T4T romance into something far thornier than you’d imagine.

Warner Bros. quashed an unauthorized Joker movie. Inside the director’s fight to save it

Vera Drew says her trans remix ‘The People’s Joker’ is fair use. The studio disagrees. The story of the $100,000 indie that started a firestorm at TIFF.

Nov. 10, 2022

In essence, this is a bonkers remixing of one of the most well-known comic book characters of all time. But with a raw vulnerability that comes from Drew plundering her own lived experience, she’s made the film serve just as well as, alternately, a trans coming-of-age tale, a probing meditation on abusive relationships and a visually inventive reminder of the queer art of camp appropriation. In her hands — and this does feel like a hand-crafted film whose scrappy animations and digitally painted backdrops lend it a homemade, textured sensibility — decades’ worth of depictions of the Joker and Batman are entry points into how pop culture can function as a self-fashioning tool.

For Drew, that early text was “Batman Forever.” In Joel Schumacher’s neon-colored vision of a rave-like Gotham City, the Chicago-born filmmaker first found herself connecting those on-screen avatars with her own unruly desires. “The People’s Joker” is a valiant guerrilla-like attempt at bringing Schumacher’s queered sensibility back into the superhero genre, expanding his movie into a rather bruising personal drama.

Equally brazen and ambitious, Drew’s film is committed to embracing the zany undertones that have always bubbled under the surface of a comic book tale in which secret identities, arch performances and fabulous outfits (all worn in the dead of night, no less) have always felt like lifelines for queer and trans kids worldwide.

'The People's Joker'

Not rated Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes Playing: Opens Friday, April 11 at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles

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Ana de Armas Kicks Serious Ass and Meets Keanu Reeves’ John Wick in ‘Ballerina’ CinemaCon Trailer

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Ana de Armas is out for blood in “ Ballerina ,” the upcoming spinoff to Lionsgate’s successful “John Wick” franchise. And she’s got a question for Keanu Reeves.

“How do I start doing what you do?” she asks the legendary hit man. “Looks like you already have,” Reeves notes wryly.

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“Ballerina” surrounds de Armas with some familiar faces in the “Wick”-verse, including Lance Reddick, Ian McShane and Anjelica Huston, who have all appeared in previous installments. “There is an anger in you,” Huston observes of de Armas. “You seek vengeance on those who harmed you.”

Here’s betting de Armas gets it when Ballerina” opens on June 6, 2025.

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