Choi Min-sik

Geoffrey Macnab's 2002 review for Sight and Sound describes the performance at the centre of Chihwaseon item by item: Choi Min-sik plays the painter Jang Seung-up with great curiosity and an insatiable appetite, and, in the critic's phrase, a Rabelaisian cheer faintly recalling Toshiro Mifune. The same piece sets the film against Im Kwon-taek's Chunhyang of 2000 and finds it darker and sadder, that central cheer standing as an exception inside the gloom. Twenty films stand to his name, acting on all twenty, running from 1992 to 2024, and he has worked twice each with four directors, Park Chan-wook among them, who made Oldboy and Lady Vengeance. On twelve of the twenty he is first in the cast, Chihwaseon one of them.