Ham Tran’s MAIKA is a surprising and very entertaining spin on the alien and child buddy movie
With strong music cues, simplistic villains, extremely broad acting, and a fairly simple story, Maika might be an insufferable movie if it were made by an American studio. (There is an English dub, which I’d be afraid to watch.) What helps make it compelling is to see the same beats of something like E.T. filtered through a different culture (or two, if you count the source material). When the kids make Home Alone-style improvised weapons to fight the villains, for example, one of their schemes is to repeatedly slap people in the face with kimchi.