Two years after the shock and awe of Korean Cinema well and truly hit our shores, the Korean Film Festival returns, ambushing Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch this December with more hand grenades from a film industry out to divide and conquer the movie world. Such is the ambition and technical cheek of Korean filmmakers that in harnessing the unlimited potential of cinema, they issue a collective challenge to everyone else. Having barely recovered from the anvil thwack of Old Boy, the KFF courageously greeted audiences with Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance in 2004, a film no other local festival wanted to touch. Together with the splendid My Sassy Girl, it succeeded in its parochialism where certain other Pan-Asian festivals have perhaps not. This year, Bong Joon-ho’s monstrous The Host headlines in its audacity and sheer grunt as a spectacle Hollywood only wishes it could make (and will probably remake). Juggling comedy, horror and shrewd political allegory, Bong almost singlehandedly reinvents the monster movie, and while it may not be pretty at times, few commercial genre films manage to be as invigorating and of-the-moment as this. It’s also the best remark on disease paranoia yet. Those who marveled at the vivacity of Lee Myung-se’s Nowhere to Hide may also want to indulge in his latest film, Duelist, a period martial arts slapstick hybrid integrating every conceivable editing and camera technique in the book. Lee shows absolutely no restraint, and the constant visual tricky gets irritating quick – though it’s hard not to admire the creative energy on display. And as a logical extension of the dance-influenced choreography of Zhang Yimou’s films, Lee fuses ballet and tango performance into fight sequences that are a breath of fresh air. From December 1-7. Visit koreanfilmfestival.co.nz for additional information.—Tim Wong