Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 111 mins | 2024
In his 32nd feature, one of modern cinema's great artists achieves new modes of expression. Hong Sangsoo's "By the Stream" continues a career-long trend of making it look easy and achieving a-ha effects that never seemed possible, all couched in a seemingly simple story of creative process. Kim Min-hee, Hong’s great muse, stars as an art professor who employs her uncle to write and direct a play on her small countryside campus, only to find an undesirable romantic bond forming between him and her boss. But what could be an entire Hong narrative is not even half of what’s happening here. "By the Stream" is a film of constant discovery: the ugly is made beautiful, the inane turned profound, and questions of unease fully mined for psychological complexity. This is a film to ponder, and finally one to rejuvenate.