In recent years, South Korean cinema has fully flowered, producing both uncompromising highly personal films and crisp, intelligent genre movies, with Shiri the most spectacular example of the latter to date.

An oddly effective mixture of technical prowess, well-executed cliché, and unexpected political poignancy.

Compelling, kinetic, fast and furious.

This is an unmistakably Asian variant on the action movie, a sleek, slick, entertaining espionage thriller in the John Woo mold.

A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.

The girl you see stabbing and shooting prisoners and fellow trainees makes the killer from "La Femme Nikita" look like a wuss.

Mr. Kang is a gifted choreographer of bloody chaos, but he has enough range and imagination to strew a few interludes of haunting tenderness amid the shell casings and ketchup packs.

The all-too-vivid simulation of terrorist attacks, including a prolonged scene of a building collapse in which people are seen plummeting to their deaths and crushed under falling concrete, may strike a very different chord with post-9/11 American audiences.

The film actually gets to tackle some larger questions than one normally finds in the average fireball drama.

The action looks impressive, even when nothing much is happening beyond local explosions or shattering glass, and the drama turns, affectingly, on a mysterious female sniper with a partitioned soul.

Americans, for better or worse, have already seen plenty of budget-busting action flicks with half-baked political pretensions.

Suffers most from being overlong.

Shamelessly derivative and politically expedient.

Though the two-hour film can go slack with excess explication, Shiri compensates with an overheated drive that forces the myopia of current events toward a broader field of vision.