Oldboy

Listen. This is the greatest foreign language film I've ever seen. It's up there among the best movies I've ever seen in general. It's a South Korean movie from 2003 based on a Japanese manga from 1997. In Oldboy, a man gets kidnapped after a night of heavy drinking. He's imprisoned in a hotel room for fifteen years. He doesn't know by whom, and he doesn't know why. Then, one day, he's released into the world. His one instinct now, naturally, is to find out who was responsible for taking fifteen years of his life away, and why. And also, you know, to hunt him down and kill him. But here's where things get interesting. The kidnapper himself is hoping that our protagonist can discover both his identity and his motive. So we've got one man trying to solve a mystery and enact his revenge, and we've got another man eagerly awaiting that man's moment of discovery. Throw in a love story that exists for more than just peripheral reasons, tack on a very disturbing twist ending, and you've got yourself a hell of a movie. At times it was action-packed, at times it was surreal and dreamlike, and at times it was downright gruesome. At all times, it held my interest, and at no time was I disappointed in a single plot development. This was just a straight up awesome movie. See it before Spike Lee ruins it with an unnecessary remake.