Avis Metacritic

Quiet, mysterious, sometimes violent, ultimately close to sublime.

Alternately witty, caustic, tender and endlessly imaginative and unpredictable.

It's a love story without all the verbal hooey and it hits harder than most.

A rarefied love story, conducted with no dialogue between the principals.

3-Iron gains its hypnotic power by observing these characters through a slight remove. With total command of his effects, Kim transforms an already peculiar romance into something as otherworldly as a ghost story.

A teasing, self-conscious and curiously heartfelt demonstration of his (Mr. Kim) mischievous formal ingenuity.

Taut even when ridiculous, with flashes of comedy, 3-Iron has less to offer than its predecessors, but at minimum it's the playful exhaustion of a formal constraint.

The almost supernatural turn which Kim's lovely film takes during its final act, however, is totally unexpected, and just one reason why Kim ranks as one of the most justly celebrated talents in contemporary Korean cinema.

The result is slightly less interesting and less appealing even as arthouse fare.

As repellent and repellently opportunistic a piece of work as the various shock-horror provocations (The Isle, The Coast Guard) that helped to launch this worrisome career (Kim Ki-Duk).