Longtime NYAFF favorite, director Ryoo Seung-Wan (City of Violence, also screening in this year’s festival), may be best known for his action movies but with The Unjust he’s delivered the best movie of his career. Like Serpico or The Wire jacked up on amphetamines, it’s a nightmare vision of twisted bureaucracy, failed government, and sprawling corruption. A corrupt cop and an even more corrupt district attorney go to war with each other as they try to find a scapegoat for a series of slayings and keep a gang war from boiling over into open violence. Echoing films like Anatomy of a Murder, The Unjust is a powerful indictment of the South Korean criminal justice system and of our own carnivorous instincts to succeed at all cost.