For some bizarre reason, I stumbled onto the High&Low series when the first movie came out in 2016. I was hooked instantly. The franchise is Japanese, and Shigeaki Kubo has directed most of the major entries. By that point I was already deep into K-dramas and C-dramas, and I’ll say it outright: Korean action movies…

Korean cinema and K-dramas have had a real grip on the world for a while now. And honestly? As someone who’s been watching them long before the Squid Game-fuelled frenzy normalised them in the West, I’ll say this without hesitation: they’re outperforming Hollywood more often than not these days. The storytelling is sharper, the pacing…