At the Korean Film Festival this week, Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach emerged as the filmmaker’s most accessible and perhaps revelatory work yet – and the festival’s best among eight others. TIM WONG caught Hong’s new wave.

Also screening as part of the Korean Film Festival, director Kwak Kyung-taek’s Typhoon is a very Korean interpretation of the sort of Hollywood blockbuster that Hollywood was making ten years ago, before they started reproducing Korean horror films en mass. Revenge, perhaps?

Typhoon follows an intrepid naval intelligence officer hunting a terrorist-pirate with a crazed need to destroy the Korean Peninsula using Russian nuclear waste. The movie quotes liberally from Jerry Bruckheimer’s school of filmmaking: there are helicopters, car chases and gun-fights-aplenty, while pretty much everything touched blows up. There is also a fair amount of flag waving, along with the obligatory questioning of the fractured relationship between the two Koreas.

Women on the Beach, by director Hong Sang-soo, is unquestionably the gem of this year’s Korean Film Festival. The film is a thoughtful yet charming romantic comedy-drama about a movie director who forms fractured relationships with two women he meets at a beach resort. Hong’s follow up to Tale of Cinema (which screened at this year’s International Film Festival) is also his most accessible offering yet.

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