Hope (2026)

Two hours and thirty-seven minutes is a lot of monster movie, and for every jaw-dropping chase in Hope there’s a stretch where Na Hong-jin seems to forget the clock exists. The creature effects also look charmingly old-school for a film this huge. The first act is terrific. Hwang Jung-min plays Ko Bum-seok, police chief of Hope Harbor, a sleepy village near the DMZ full of elderly folks, whose cousin shows him a dead cow and blames a stray tiger. It is not a tiger. Backup is busy fighting wildfires, so he’s stuck with a retired colonel and a rookie, Jung Ho-yeon’s Sung-ae, easily the toughest person in the county. It’s best when these flustered, outgunned humans scramble, and the highway chases are legit nuts. Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander are in this too, and the less you know going in, the better. A 7.0 because the thrills are huge and the bloat is real. $2,927 says the next time you drive past a field of cows, you check the tree line and hit the gas a little.

What works: The chases are thrilling, the production design is enormous, and the film is at its best watching outgunned small-town cops scramble to keep up.

What doesn’t: At 157 minutes it drags between set pieces, and the creature effects look quaint for a production this ambitious.

Who it’s for: Fans of big, strange Korean genre films who are happy to give a monster movie two and a half hours.