The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

23. 2003 - Memories Of Murder

Memories Of Murder
CJ Entertainment

Honourable Mentions: Kill Bill: Vol. 1, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Over a decade before he received mainstream international acclaim with the award-winning Parasite, South Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho directed a supremely unsettling and heartrending thriller called Memories of Murder. His sophomore feature, arriving after 2000's Barking Dogs Never Bite, Memories of Murder dramatises the story of South Korea's first confirmed serial killings, through which Director Bong explores themes of a repressed national trauma, institutional failure, and the existential pain that comes when closure remains frustratingly out of reach.

It's unapologetically confrontational and self-scrutinising, anathema to generic true crime in the sense that it's less concerned with the procedural elements of detective fiction and building a mythology around its subject matter and more about the emotional cost such acts of cruelty exert on both a micro and macro level. It shares much in common with David Fincher's Zodiac, in that way, and like Zodiac, Bong's film remains one of this century's most essential.

 
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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.