WOMAN ON THE BEACH: A

In the beautiful, drily funny/sad relationship dramas of South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo (Tale of Cinema), the heart never knows what it wants. Men forever fumble and screw up, women are forever disappointed by the opposite sex, and then everyone drinks too much and goes to bed with the wrong partner. Woman on the Beach, Hong's latest, is his best and most optimistic, a triangle tale about a filmmaker with writer's block (Kim Seung-woo), his production associate (Kim Tae-woo), and a woman (Ko Hyun-joung) teetering between them on, yes, a wintry Korean beach. —Lisa Schwarzbaum

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