A man is imprisoned for fifteen years by an unknown captor. He is then let out and given only five days to find him. Thats the ingenious setup to Chan Woo-Parks disturbing Oldboy, a cult foreign-cinema gem which gave us two or three of the great set-pieces of the decade ('00-'10). Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes film festival, Oldboy immediately picked up a cult following, not least from director Quentin Tarantino, who presided over the award as president of the jury that year. The second installment of Park's Vengeance trilogy, coming in-between Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Sympathy for the Lady, Oldboy is the director's best-known film, its cult status amplified when Spike Lee chose to remake Oldboy for American audiences, largely failing to capture the appeal of the original in the process.
