In Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), Gene Hackman’s Harry Moseby dismissively declines an invitation to a screening of My Night at Maude’s: “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” For paint-drying-aficionados of slower cinema, if that’s how films by the French New Wave director Éric Rohmer can be described, then his South Korean heir, Hong Sang-soo, makes movies that are akin to watching Robert Ryman paint. “It is a critical truism—and only partially true—that […] Sang-soo makes the same movie over and over,” wrote The New Yorker’s Dennis Lim in 2022 (a similar truism could be said of Ryman’s career-spanning focus on white). Almost comically prolific, the 63-year-old director, since 2021, has released films at a clip of two per year. Austere both stylistically and thematically, Sang-soo’s low-budget approach is minimalist; he works with hardly any crew and decides on loose outlines of scenes day-of, only to scrap ideas mid-shoot. His favorite actors, a de facto repertory company that includes his paramour Kim Min-hee, play his plainly autobiographical scenarios with a commitment to quotidian realism film after film, no matter how repetitious. Long, static, uninterrupted takes of the characters’ improvised conversations—often while walking, smoking, eating, and drinking—are a signature. (The actors are frequently soused on soju by the end of a scene.) Sang-soo’s movies tend to only screen at film festivals such as Berlin and Cannes, where he’s achieved fest-darling status. Luckily for Londoners, from October 25 through December 8 the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is presenting “The Human Comedy: The Cinema of Hong Sang-soo,” the first U.K. retrospective of his work in 14 years. Staggeringly, he’s made 22 features since then. —Spike Carter