Anglophone scholarship on Korean cinema is a millennial phenomenon, beginning in the early 2000s amidst a contemporaneous boom in the South Korean film industry that followed a period of liberalization after democratic reforms in the early 1990s. Given its relatively recent establishment, most texts in the field have hewed closely to a national cinema paradigm, tracking cinema's role in the establishment of national identity in the context of postwar development and as an expression of public culture. Since the 2010s, however, newer works have complicated this straightforward national schema to examine regional exchanges and transnational forms, in response to the rise in visibility and global aspirations of other culture industries sectors—particularly those commodities that fall under the umbrella of hallyu or “the Korean wave”—and shifts in the South Korean film industry toward global markets and international co-production. Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient's Movie Migrations is an important work in this transnational turn in the study of Korean film, media, and popular culture. It deftly weaves together eclectic, interdisciplinary references, from transnational literary studies to political economy, translation and adaptation studies, film genre studies, and inter-Asian and Pacific Rim cultural studies.

Presented in two parts, the book begins by introducing its transnational reading method with four chapters that center on works from the 1950s and 1960s, a period that is now referred to as the “Golden Age” of South Korean film production. These chapters range in scope from narratological analysis of Korean and Hollywood versions of overlapping melodramatic tropes to biographical interpretation of the star text of popular screen patriarch Kim Sŭng-ho. Part two focuses on genre-bending, contemporary works of the millennial South Korean film renaissance, and includes auteur analysis and allegorical interpretation in its reading of watershed works like Untold Scandal (2003, directed by E J-Yoon), Oldboy (2003, directed by Park Chan-wook), and The Host (2006, directed by Bong Joon-ho). While part one could be described as tracking migrations from the outside in, detailing the Hollywood source texts for Korean cinematic melodrama, part two reverses this trajectory, theorizing the outflow and global reach of South Korean cine-cosmopolitanism.

What sets Movie Migrations apart from other works is that it juxtaposes analyses of early postwar, “Golden Age” cinema and the contemporary era of transnationally legible genre cinemas, whereas other works to date have mostly dealt with single periods or genres, which has resulted in a discontinuous account of South Korean film culture that perhaps overstates the revolutionary effect of media liberalization and transnational exchange in the new cinema of the 2000s. With persuasive archival evidence and close formal analysis of the direct adaptation of Hollywood archetypes and popular narratives, Movie Migrations makes a strong case for the claim that Korean cinema has always already been transnational, far prior to the emergence of such “blockbuster” action or cult film triumphs as Shiri (1999, directed by Kang Je-gyu) or Oldboy. Chung and Diffrient's book thus provides an illuminating and necessary historical account of Korean popular cinemas in the postwar period that demonstrates a continuous through-line of adaptational practices that have come to define South Korean film output. Through detailed case studies of particular films and their modes of translation and transnational adaptation, Movie Migrations demonstrates the ways in which global forms are localized by both producers and consumers in the process of transnational movement and, moreover, how the transnational migration of texts and genres allows the emergence of new forms, such as in the case of the revisionist period film or sagǔk discussed in chapter 5.

Chung and Diffrient explain the significance of territorial movement and “migratory interest” in their introduction, characterizing “movie migrations” as “textual expressions of an extratextual phenomenon, one that maps onto broader transnational flows—of capital, of labor, of technologies, of ideas and values—unique to the era of rapid economic and cultural globalization” (p. 5). This establishes their emphasis on allegorical interpretation of their chapters' individual film cases, as they suggest that both the form and the content of the film works express contemporaneous and ongoing practices and networks of transnational movement and exchange. This implicit claim for the sociopolitical import of film representation is confirmed in the book's theorization of genre, as the value of genre-bending becomes most evident and “[provides] opportunities to imagine a way of reclaiming, or renarrativizing, the past, to poke holes in the Symbolic and let the Real bleed through,” according to the authors, if “genre is to be conceived as means of artificially arranging ‘real life’ into a particular aesthetic form” (p. 162). What can be a bit unclear, given this framework for thinking about the relationship between reality and representation, is the extent to which terms like migration, translation, adaptation, and “thievery” (p. 4), are to be understood as subjective modalities for actual agents, such as film directors, writers, actors, or audiences. In particular, the foregrounding of Hollywood/”Western” productions as the originators of film genre per se (in the enduring forms of the Hollywood melodrama and the Western in part one) might run the risk of returning to some long-standing and constraining axioms of a national cinema model of analysis, which has defined national cinemas against Hollywood as a monolithic norm, despite the authors' intent to spotlight the transnational as a critical apparatus against the dominance of the national rubric in film studies.

Any ambiguities in theorization, however, hardly diminish Chung and Diffrient's achievement in offering a compelling and necessary account of the centrality of adaptation in South Korean cinema culture, with the nuanced assertion that while the national cannot secure the appeal and influence of popular narrative and mass culture, it is at the same time, in the South Korean context, an absolutely indispensable rubric through which audiences and filmmakers localize and adapt transnational forms.