No. 3

A brilliantly inventive, off-the-wall satire on the gangster mentality. Tae-Ju (Han) joins a gang in 1990, when economic times are hard, and finds himself stuck at No 3 in the hierarchy - essentially a low grade hatchet man. His efforts to get ahead are not helped by his wife's infidelity (she aspires to a literary career and starts taking lessons) or by the attentions of a cynical, bad mannered prosecutor who dogs his steps. The action leapfrogs through the years until Tae-Ju finally settles his rivalry with the gang's No 2 (Ashtray, named after his weapon of choice) in a night-club called Chaos; a coda whisks the characters into the future to see what becomes of them after the millennium. First-time director Song, previously best known as the writer of Taebaek Mountains, reportedly based it on his encounters with a real-life gang boss.