The frustrating thing about watching a movie after it’s won a bunch of awards and been met with tons of praise is, you can’t really look at the movie on its own without thinking, “well, should it have won all those things?”

And particularly in the case of this movie, where no non-English language movie had ever won the Best Picture Oscar, and where movies like Green Book are as likely as Moonlight to win, it’s like, wow, this movie must have been amazing for such a middlebrow award to have gotten out of the English-language section for the first time ever.

And then… the movie’s very good. It really is. It’s got gorgeous cinematography from minute one, it’s got interesting characters who are all well-acted, it’s clearly About Something, and it’s full of fast-paced action.

But maybe a little too full. As it keeps ramping things up, at a certain point it kinda crosses into melodrama. When you describe the plot of the movie (which I will not), it isn’t that long before it sounds like you’re describing an episode of Lost.

I can’t help but compare it to Burning, which is doing a lot of the same thing, but is a slower, somewhat more low-key (although not that low-key) movie. And on the one hand, I want to say that Burning does more with less, and avoids this kind of overstuffed feeling, but on the other hand, this movie is definitely a breezier watch than Burning was, and I probably like it a little better.

So yeah, I think it’s very good. And if I had watched it when this first came out, I’d be saying, “it was very good, you should go see it” and all that. But instead I’m saying, “it was very good… but why is this the movie that won an Oscar instead of one of dozens of other non-English language movies?”

Anyway, though, if you ignore the Oscars — probably a good practice on net — this is a very good movie, and you should check it out on Hulu.