Nowhere to Hide (1999)
Directed by Lee Myung-se
Detective Woo is on the trail of the mysterious gangster Sungmin, a master of disguise who always manages to elude his pursuers. Eventually, the cop tracks down and confronts the master-criminal in the suburbs of a coal-mining town.
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What critics compared Nowhere to Hide to
Lee may be overtly mining the territory of Woo and Tarantino, but in the end his sensibility is closer to that of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai (whose radiantly expressionistic 1994 "Chungking Express" itself channels Jean-Luc Godard). Lee has a mischievous elfin streak, a penchant for trying naughty little tricks that shouldn't work but somehow do: During that stakeout sequence mentioned earlier, when Woo and Kim wax wistful about hot soup, Lee plunks a blurry-edged surrealist vision of it in the corner of the frame, steam shimmering from its glistening surface like a wraith in a Cocteau film.
( Chungking Express predates Nowhere To Hide by several years, but Lee’s career dates back to 1989, and those early films are rarely screened, so for all I know he did get there first, as he claims.)