77
Metascore
12 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 88Slant MagazineChuck BowenSlant MagazineChuck BowenThe film is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges, and resonant dead ends and false starts.
- 83The PlaylistCaitlin QuinlanThe PlaylistCaitlin QuinlanIntroduction initially feels like a smaller, quieter addition to the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Still, it proves to be another delicate and profound testament to how our lives can always be intertwined with those from our past, to the everyday human interactions, and especially to the honesty and wide-eyed possibility of youth.
- 80Screen DailyLee MarshallScreen DailyLee MarshallThis is a ‘minor’ Hong compared to some of the sixteen films he has premiered since 2010 . . . But it’s still a delight, a wistful, smart, chamber piece that gently teases out questions about whether you can love someone without controlling them in some way, whether acting can be sincere or sincerity can be an act, and how much of our life in the present and future is conditioned by our life in the past (a lot, as it turns out – but we knew that already).
- 80VarietyJessica KiangVarietyJessica KiangThis tiny little movie makes seemingly effortless work of convincing us that a comment, a story, a film and maybe even a whole filmography can be both important and casual — in Hong’s case, radically casual — at the same time. It makes Introduction as bracing as a brief dip in a freezing sea after a rather too soju-soaked luncheon.
- 80The New YorkerRichard BrodyThe New YorkerRichard BrodyIts clarity and simplicity—and the outrageous, nearly humorous audacity with which its brisk mysteries conjure wide-ranging, complex, and turbulent stories—makes it among Hong’s most compulsively rewatchable films.
- 80The New York TimesA.O. ScottThe New York TimesA.O. ScottShot in black and white (with Hong serving, for the first time, as cinematographer) and clocking in at a little more than an hour, Introduction is both lucid and elusive.
- 75The Film StageDavid KatzThe Film StageDavid KatzIntroduction is a thick, tangled ball of yarn, compact but dense; like beloved Hong influence Bresson’s off-screen space, non-narrative information is ample and cosmic. But for all the deliberate choices and teasing ellipses, this is one of the director’s more meager works, appearing unfinished and misshapen rather than productively clipped at the edges.
- 75The PlaylistThe PlaylistHong these days acts as his own D.P., editor, and composer, as well as being a writer-director, and there’s a stark elegance to Introduction, a sense of an artist honing his craft down to its simplest, most telling gestures.
- 60The GuardianPeter BradshawThe GuardianPeter BradshawIntroduction, like so many of Hong’s films, occupies a delicate middle ground between whimsy and poetry, between inconsequentiality and epiphany, between lightweight and light. My feeling is that Introduction is closer to the former in each case, and I wanted to hear more about and more from Young-ho’s troubled father. But there is an unmistakable and mature film-making language on display: a simplicity and charm.
- 58IndieWireDavid EhrlichIndieWireDavid EhrlichSlight and discursive even by the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic standards, Introduction refuses to auto-correct for anyone who doesn’t already speak conversational Hong.