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Director Na, Hong-jin catapulted himself into the Korean directing elite with his much lauded debut movie, The Chaser, back in 2008. His follow-up, The Yellow Sea, received more tepid response, but there was little doubt that here was a movie-maker who had the potential to be spoken of in the same sentence as Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. His latest, The Wailing, starts with more than a passing resemblance to Bong's masterpiece, Memories of Murder. There's a series of grisly, unexplained murders in a backward-looking (although in The Wailing's case contemporary) countryside, which is then investigated by ordinary cops – more put-upon locals in uniform than law enforcers – increasingly out of their depth. What appears first as simple murders of passion begins to spread across the village, while an increasing number of people fall victim to a violent – and violence-inducing – fever, including the young daughter of one of the policemen on the case, Jong- gu. A portly every-man and a doting father, he is bewildered by the severity of the crimes (especially so in a hitherto tranquil countryside) and heart-broken by his daughter's sudden affliction. Desperate to find a cure, Jong-gu (played by Kwak, Do-won, a Na alumnus from Yellow Sea) and his friends latch onto the fact that the fever seemingly started after an unknown Japanese man appeared in the area. The more they delve into the stranger (Jun Kunimura, best known for getting decapitated by Lucy Liu in Kill Bill), the more Jong-gu realizes that the situation may belong more in the realms of the unnatural. Enlisting the help of a charismatic shaman, Jong-gu goes to the extremes to find a solution. Fittingly for the fishing motif that's so prevalent in the film, however, the more he bites at the problem, the more he seems to be ensnared.

It's been a while since a Korean film had this kind of craftsmanship and artistic control to match its ambition. In many ways The Wailing is the true successor to the class of 2003 – when A Tale of Two Sisters and Oldboy as well as the aforementioned Memories of Murder were released – with how confidently the visuals are displayed, the themes are interwoven, and the story unfolds. The forebodingly beautiful cinematography nods at Kubrick, the acting is exemplary (including a worryingly remarkable turn from the child actress Kim, Hwan-hee as Jong-gu's daughter), and most of all the atmosphere of escalating horror that Na captures is impressively unsavoury indeed. The film is a bold departure (or throwback, depending on how you look at it) for Korean cinema in its heavy emphasis on the occult, a theme more associated in the country with the well-worn moralism of its ghost stories and the oft-parodied rituals of harlequin-esque shamans. At well over two and a half hours, The Wailing is a hefty movie, but with its potent mixture of procedural mystery, black comedy and a prevailing sense of dread, it commands attention masterfully for much of the duration.

The one drawback for the film is a significant one that takes the shine off what could otherwise have been a landmark movie. During the course of the film Na throws a number of questions and macguffins up in the air. Who or what is causing the fever? Can the shaman be trusted? Is the Japanese stranger a victim of xenophobia? Who is the nameless girl always hovering around the crime scenes? Or is it all just collective hallucination caused by bad mushrooms? The Wailing takes its twists and turns, apparently answering the questions and overturning expectations. But then it keeps going, reopening closed plot strands and even downright contradicting itself on occasions. It soon becomes apparent that Na isn't so much interested in telling a self-contained story than an exercise in audience-baiting. All of the elements in the film which were so compelling and enjoyable are not allowed to coalesce together in the end, and the actions and motives of the major characters – the Japanese man, Jong-gu and his daughter, the shaman, the nameless girl – are ultimately rendered disparate, abstract and illogical. The ending is neither closed nor open-ended, but rather wilfully indeterminate, and it's tempting to think that Na is applying the film's fishing motif to the audience. Whether it's an appropriately auteur thing to do, or a self-defeating display of directorial indulgence, is perhaps best left to the individual viewer to decide.

This should have been the environmental class action film with multiple Academy nominations and cultural impact, not Erin Brockovich. As far as the narrative is concerned, A Civil Action is pretty much the same story: dastardly corporations are causing irreparable damage to the health of local residents, a crusading legal eagle takes up the case on behalf of the suffering plaintiffs, and courtroom drama ensues. But it's not about the against-the-odds triumph of the plucky blue-collar heroes against heartless business behemoths. Atypically for a Hollywood movie, it's a story of futility and defeat. The defence council, led by an Oscar-nominated turn from Robert Duvall, fights a war of attrition against the little guys and forces John Travolta, playing the said crusader Jan Schlichtmann, to choose between his principles and his career. When he rejects settlement offers to plough on ahead for the decision, the movie rewards him with failure. Schlichtmann goes from a Porsche-riding 'most eligible bachelor' to bankruptcy, although there's a postscript which gives him a moral victory. A Civil Action is a rare, brave mainstream film that doesn't sugarcoat the tortuous legal process that class action plaintiffs face against conglomerates, and doesn't resort to easy solutions where they aren't deserved. Schlichtmann, a glorified ambulance-chaser with modest academic background whose attack of conscience proves so costly, is way out of his depth against the Ivy League sharks he squares up to. His journey from go-getting arrogance to embattled ruin, before achieving a pyrrhic selflessness is convincing, and in this role Travolta is exceptional. He made a run of interesting, at times compelling films between his Pulp Fiction resurrection and Battlefield: Earth disaster, which included Get Shorty, Mad City, Face/Off and Primary Colors, but A Civil Action is arguably the most impressive of them all, and undoubtedly the most overlooked. More nuanced and fulfilling than Erin Brockovich, it's deserving of greater recognition.

Such is the greatness of Ghibli's backlog that each new release cannot hope to escape comparison with the old favourites. It has now been a full decade since the last truly great movie from the studio ('Spirited Away') and nine years since the last purely enjoyable one ('The Cat Returns'). All movies since had their moments, but their uneven quality whether it was a full-fledged fantasy like Howl's Moving Castle (2004) or more sedate affairs like last year's The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) did not make it easy for Ghibli's devoted following to love them unreservedly. Miyazaki Hayao's son, Goro, made his debut with Tales from Earthsea (2006), which wasn't received very well, prompting some to question whether Ghibli's future would be secure after Miyazaki Senior's inevitable final retirement. From Up on Poppy Hill is Goro's second feature, and while it is an accessible and enjoyable effort, it lacks the kind of profound detail and nostalgia that made Only Yesterday (1991) and Whisper of the Heart (1995) so special.

Set in Yokohama, Japan just before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Poppy Hill tells the story of Umi, a second-year high school girl who lives and works at a tenant house run by her grandmother. Her father was a sailor who was lost at sea during the Korean War and presumed dead; her mother is studying in the US and thus also an absent figure for Umi. Every morning she raises signal flags out on the garden which overlooks the ocean as a way to remember her lost father, before embarking on a daily routine rigidly structured around school and the chores she must perform at her home. One day she runs into a reckless, dashing senior named Shun, and soon allows her life to open up to the optimism and energy of the teen idealists who occupy Quartier Latin, a dilapidated school clubhouse where the more intellectually-disposed male students have set up various headquarters for their extracurricular activities. Umi helps out Shun with his newspaper printing, and ends up fighting alongside him and the occupants of the clubhouse to save Quartier Latin against the forces of change which holds sway in Japan. Meanwhile, unforeseen revelations about their families' past force Umi and Shun, who are increasingly drawn to each other, to reconsider their feelings.

The real-world setting and small-scale drama of Poppy Hill place the film in that category of the more contemplative and tranquil Ghibli animation alongside Only Yesterday and Whisper, but it doesn't come close to joining the two in the pantheon of the studio's most beloved hits. What those two movies did was to depict the everyday routine and the smallest trivial action with the same affection and wonder, not to mention painstaking detail, as it did flying dragons and wolf-gods; Ghibli treated things like sharpening a pencil or coming home after school like they were the most special things in the world, deserving of care and skill and attention - only we don't realize it. Only Yesterday and Whisper continue to resonate with their audience because they endeavoured to draw fantasy not from the outlandish but from the mundane, the normal, the everyday. They stand apart from the role-playing wish-fulfillment of countless animes and the likes of Harry Potter and The Matrix and suggest in their inimitable, tender way that we should treasure the lives we lead now, that they deserve the same kind of longing and wonder, and hinted at worthwhile fulfillment within real means.

Sadly, there's no such transcendental detail and affection in Poppy Hill nor the kind of daring whimsy which so invigorated classics like My Neighbour Totoro (1988) and Kiki's Delivery Service (1989). Thematically it's cookie-cutter safe, despite the fact that the post-war Japan about to begin a miraculous industrial rise would seem to be a rare and ripe backdrop for a more tellingly contextual study of a time of great change in Japanese society and the place in it for the young people and their environment that are drawn so handsomely in the film. There's great energy in Miyazaki's depiction of the students fighting to save the clubhouse due to make way for a more modern building, and the period detail of rural Yokohama as well as (more briefly) Tokyo in the throes of transformation is nicely realized and easily the best thing about the film. However, Miyazaki stops well short of dealing with the teen would-be activists and what they really represent: a poignant reminder of a lost generation of young Japanese idealists who ended up conforming to the overwhelming preponderance of materialism and political stagnation which came to define the rise of a new Japan in the Seventies and Eighties, and who would never again manage to bring to bear the sort of vigilant activism displayed in Poppy Hill.

Its breezy style is more reminiscent of The Cat Returns, but while that film was a concentrated distillation of the usual flight of fancy the studio specialized in and was aimed to literally take the audience on a short, thrilling ride, 'Poppy Hill' would have benefited from a more patient and intricate approach. There's certainly enjoyable set-pieces, like the girls cleaning up the dungeon-like school clubhouse which hitherto had been the exclusive domain of boys, or Umi going about her daily routine of grocery shopping and cooking for the students tenanting at her grandmother's house, but Miyazaki doesn't seem to have the confidence or patience to linger on each scene and let us observe what implications a country in transformation have on Umi; we just watch her get into one brief situation after another, few of which are compelling in plot or presentation, and then the film is over. Poppy Hill is certainly a diverting fare, endearing in places and easy to like, but it is in no way a return to form for the studio, and small improvement for the would-be pretender to Miyazaki Senior's throne.

While there's no doubt that its willfully unassuming title will throw off at least a few high-minded film-goers, 'Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected' is an accessible and undemanding comedy that showcases director Satoshi Miki's inimitable brand of unconventional humour. Juri Ueno, already in her second cinematic lead role at the tender age of 19, plays a bored, neglected housewife who chances upon a rather small (to put it mildly) recruiting poster for spies. Her decision to join a furtive band of gloriously inactive secret agents allows her to gradually regain the sense of initiative and self-worth she once possessed in her student days but had lost along the way.

Of course, it's not nearly as formulaic or wooden as all that, and the movie above all is a vehicle for Miki to flex his comic muscles. There are some lovely moments, mostly involving the delightful pairing of Ryo Iwamatsu and Eri Fuse as the husband-and-wife team of spies who become Ueno's mentors (the restaurant scene is particularly enjoyable); and Ueno plays the painfully normal Suzume with a consummate and quiet ease which has informed all her other characters to date. She is clearly a natural actress, and coming off the heels of 'Swing Girls', here is another main part that Ueno breathes life into with such understated confidence.

Everything, however, is run through with Miki's discerning eye for the quirky which is more amusing than funny, and the movie doesn't quite reach the level of inventive tomfoolery that it clearly aspires to. 'Turtles' is determinedly low-key, lo-fi and low-maintenance, meaning that for every joke the price is exacted in meandering narrative and lack of focus. Miki also criminally wastes the charming Yu Aoi as Ueno's uninhibited friend, a character who drifts in and out of the story and fails to provide the comic momentum that is hinted at.

'Turtles' is a fairly enjoyable film in its own right, but the main interest for it lies in the fact that much of the cast and indeed style would go on to help create Miki's next project, the brilliant TV series 'Jiko Keisatsu (Limitation Police)'. For those who enjoyed 'Turtles', this comic drama is essential viewing; and if the movie left you underwhelmed, know that 'Jiko Keisatsu' is a thrilling realization of the potential Miki showed here and you could do a lot worse than checking it out.

Made before the Asian film wave of the late 90s and often inexplicably neglected in John Woo retrospectives, with the unfortunate result of being rather unknown to many cinephiles worldwide, 'A Better Tomorrow' and its sequel nevertheless became arguably the first real example of a pop culture phenomenon that seized the imagination of the entire Far Eastern region and helped create a craze for Hong Kong films that lasted a decade (go into any street in Seoul or Tokyo and hum Leslie Cheung's theme song, and chances are there will be at least some who will still recognize it). It is difficult to describe now just what a zeitgeist-making movie this really was: it catapulted not only the director Woo and the leading man Chow to superstardom, but helped put Leslie Cheung over the top in the film business with a hitherto rare serious role and that song.

As a concentrated concoction of melodramatic violence, it doesn't quite measure up to 'The Killer', and lacks the balletic geometry of 'Hard Boiled', but the doomed camaraderie of Chow and his crew, reminiscent of the classic westerns or perhaps 'Seven Samurai', and the surprisingly sensitive treatment of wounded machismo, set 'Tomorrow' apart from subsequent Hong Kong actioners. Chow looks so effortlessly cool that it is with aching regret that you watch his Hollywood disasters (Tinseltown tended to treat his character as a sort of Freeman-lite sage, protégé in tow, whereas Chow was always at his best as a quietly smouldering loner); Cheung, already a star, became a legitimate Asian icon; and Woo, for whom 'Tomorrow' was the first real success and would incontestably go on to make more complete movies, hasn't quite yet managed to dress so well the sorrow of men's failed dreams with such stylish violence again.

It is remarkable to compare Hong Kong's approach to destructive masculinity in action movies with the contemporary sturm-und-drang of Schwarzenegger-era Hollywood: while the latter concentrated on biceps the size of the Alps and explosions of increasingly tectonic severity, Woo helped create a seminal style of graceful, tightly defined slow-mo set-pieces and a narrative, though simple, that was always grounded in identifiable human emotions. At least some of these elements would famously go on to influence turn-of-century Hollywood, but this is where it all started - the original and still definitive John Woo/Chow Yun-Fat collaboration, and the quintessential 80s Asian movie experience.

The title, meaning 'The Purpose of Dating' in English, is extremely misleading: this is a would-be critique of the misogynist, sexist culture manifest in Korean society. Kang Hye-Jung, of 'Oldboy' fame, is an intern teacher working with a lecherous, insincere Park Hae-Il, who asks her to sleep with him on her first day of work and continues to hit on her. She resists him at first, then tries to match his aggressive, unreasonable advances with equally outrageous counteroffers, then starts to fall for him.

Much of what the film tries to do is very laudable: through Hong it asks some troubling questions about the culture of victimization women who are unfairly labeled as 'loose' or 'man-eaters' suffer in Korea. 'The Purpose of Dating' has some very felt words to say about the hypocrisy of such misogynistic attitudes: Hong's former lover who abandoned her and spread poisonous lies around to make her seem like a desperate stalker in order to save his own reputation; the female teachers at the school who pompously warn of 'home-wreckers'; and Lee, who exploits his positional superiority to prey on Hong, are all both the cause and the symptoms of the sexist, witch-hunting culture still prevalent in Korea. In terms of drama, there are some scenes, particularly the 'moment of truth' at the school towards the end where Hong turns the table on Lee, that stir the blood in a way not seen since Christian faced off with his father in 'Festen'.

However, the storyline mechanisms which call for Hong to fall in love with her tormentor/lover Lee are so insufferably smug and contrived, not to mention wildly implausible - the highlight being Hong's inexplicable attraction to Lee - that any notion of realism or social relevance are largely thwarted. It won't do to simply film the movie in a realistic style or deal with realistic situations, because Hong's character is infuriatingly inconsistent, and Lee depressingly dislikeable. It completely undermines the movie's credibility to have such ridiculous lead characters, never mind have them carry out the most nonsensical romance seen in quite sometime. And the film's coda, which sees Hong and Lee together in gleefully contrasting circumstances, is mind-blowingly unconvincing: Lee, one of the most repulsive cinematic creations of the last 5 years, gets nowhere near his just deserts, ending up in the arms of the now-rehabilitated, happily employed Hong, whom he does not deserve. A truly ludicrous, self-defeating ending if ever there was one.

It may look like just another saccharine love-triangle romance, but 'Hana and Alice' is actually a deceptively tender and subtle paean to how gorgeous and sweet friendship can be. Although initially we have two high-school girls, Anne Suzuki and Aoi Yuu, squabble over a hapless senior, the film isn't really about teen crushes and jealousy. Instead, as layers of each girl's background and character are peeled away, we discover a surprising amount of depth and resonance to Hana and Alice's friendship. The ballet scene is much talked about and fawned over, but the real highlight for me was where we find out that Hana was in fact a near-autistic child, shunning the outer world from her flower house, until Alice came along and enticed her out into the world. This scene increases the emotional strength of both the film and the girls' relationship exponentially, and turns the movie from merely entertaining into truly touching.

Director Shunji Iwai once again establishes a particularly delectable mood - as only he can - and has the guts to carry it all the way. Although most of the press and public attention in the Far East focused on the freshness of Aoi Yuu, it is the former child actor Suzuki Anne who gives a performance of veritable subtlety, so nuanced and superbly mannered that you almost don't notice it until you give it a thought. She has the less flashy and more mundane role of the two, yet there isn't one moment where she's caught acting, something that sadly can't be said for Yuu. To think that Suzuki has just turned 18 - what a career she has in store for us.

Although somewhat long and dragging in places (you can only enjoy so many shots of young girls in tights dancing - no, hang on...) 'Hana and Alice' is a rare instance where one is allowed a flight of fancy without the attendant guilt, and in which friendship is explored with affection not angst. Don't let the fluffy romance tag fool you: this is a film which makes you nostalgic for those dreary days back in youth when you had your best friend walk alongside you on the way to school and didn't realize how special or fleeting it was.

This is a small masterpiece, one of the best films released in 2004. On the cover, it's an unlikely romance between an easy-going college boy and a captivating girl who is disabled from the waist down, but it doesn't even begin to show how wonderfully astute this film is in dealing with still-youthful emotions of its characters. 'Joze' captures what it's like to be young and in love perfectly, but it's never self-conscious or brash about it; it also deals with the question of disability in a quiet, subtle way, never patronizing it or pandering to its sentimental possibilities. Satoshi Tsumabuki of 'Waterboys' fame plays nicely against type as the well-meaning but shallow Tsuneo, while Chizuru Ikewaki is truly beguiling as the titular heroine. 'Joze' is a romance whose refreshing honesty and quiet courage is so rare these days that it may well go down as one of a kind. It's also one of the very few films to achieve a level of true emotional resonance, with an ending that is both low-key and utterly devastating at the same time. It is a moment that stays in your mind long after you've left the cinema, growing more and more tender as you dwell on it.