A Complete Ranking of Every Bong Joon-ho Movie, Including Mickey 17

Bong’s very first feature film was 2srcsrcsrc’s Barking Dogs Never Bite, a shocking film and a dark comedy in every sense of the word. This is far from a perfect movie, and it’s easy to see how Bong learned from mistakes he may have made here to continually improve his craft movie-by-movie.

If you’re a fan of his, this one is still worth checking out. The plot—admittedly a strange one—centers on a man in an apartment complex who’s driven mad by the sound of barking dogs. So mad, in fact, that he begins to kidnap them. A neighbor finds out, begins to investigate, and on the movie goes.

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In this 2src17 Netflix original, a dark satire examining corporate relations with animals, Bong crafted a film specifically around a genetically-engineered ‘superpig’ made with the purpose of being eaten. This is one of the director’s more whimsical and goofy efforts, but the story is gripping and the visuals are stunning. And the cast? Yeah, with Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, and even Choi Woo-shik (who you’ll recognize as the son from Parasite), you’re definitely in good hands. Dano, Swinton, and Gylenhaal are particularly good, and keep an eye out for Lily Collins playing a very cool character as well.

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Bong’s latest film, Mickey 17, comes with a stacked cast (led by Robert Pattinson, but also including Toni Collette, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, and Mark Ruffalo) and an ambitious premise: Pattinson plays an “expendable,” who keeps dying and being regenerated for futuristic testing reasons. Mickey 17 is Bong having fun in a sci-fi setting with great actors, and doing it in a way that is a blast to watch. The great director Park Chan-wook said that Pattinson should win two Oscars for the film—one for Best Actor, and one for Best Supporting Actor. And we can’t argue too much with that.

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Bong’s first foray into the english language is this dark and gritty glimpse into a dystopian future, where society is divided by class, and only exists in one very, very long train. This is a sci-fi/action/adventure movie to the fullest, and with Chris Evans in the lead, it stars just about the best person you can get for something like that. Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, Octavia Spencer, and Song Kang-Ho (star of Parasite, and also a frequent Bong collaborator) lead a really stellar cast in one of the best genre films of the 2src1srcs.

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In 2src1src, Bong went the direction of murder mystery with Mother (not to be confused with Darren Aronofsky’s bizarre 2src17 film Mother!). This movie focuses on a middle-aged woman whose entire world is thrown for a loop when her mentally-disabled son is accused of a murder that she swears he didn’t commit. Her journey to find the truth makes for one of Bong’s best in his stable of great films.

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Think of David Fincher‘s 2srcsrc7 film Zodiac, or his Netflix series Mindhunter, and you’re in the right genre space for Bong’s Memories of Murder. Also starring Song Kang-ho from Snowpiercer and Parasite, Memories of Murder is about the hunt for the first-ever Korean serial killer. Bong has previous compared his film to Fincher’s Zodiac: “I’m a huge fan of David Fincher, but please remember this film came out four years before Zodiac,” he said.

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You know this one (and if you somehow don’t—welcome!). Bong’s latest film won him a nearly-unprecedented four Oscars (until Sean Baker did it with Anora this year!), including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature (though the final award technically goes to the country of South Korea and not Bong himself). Beyond an amazing script and a flawless cast, this is a movie best to see blindly, and then watching over, and over, and over again. With some laughs, some thrills, and some tears, this movie has everything—and every honor it received was a well-deserved one.

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