If you can stomach yet another set of top ten lists – not to mention ones that appear terribly out-of-sync with the rest of the movie world (that’s New Zealand’s geographical isolation for you) – a handful of Lumière’s regular film contributors present their year in film.

As red carpets roll out, gold statuettes are buffed up, and potential Oscar nominations roll in, ‘tis the season for giving... awards. From Bae Doona to Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi, from Michael Haneke to Michael K. Williams, TIM WONG salutes the (alternative) faces behind the year’s best in film and television.

As you trawl the foyer of your local theatre, the posters that line its walls aren’t mere decoration, but invitations, while the great one-sheets aren’t just memorabilia, but monuments to the allure of cinema. Surveying the year that was, TIM WONG selects the ten best poster designs of 2006.

An encore roundup of the current best and rest in DVD. In this installment: The Woody Allen Collection, Essential Hopscotch Documentaries Vol 1: Fahrenheit 9/11/Soundtrack to War/Touching the Void, Bonnie and Clyde, Kingdom of Heaven, Carnivale: The Complete Second Season.

Reviewed by Robert Metcalf

SACHA BARON COHEN has been doing the rounds as Borat for some years now, beginning with Borat’s Guide to Britain in the first Ali G series. He has now developed the Borat story into a feature-length film – often a difficult exercise for a previously incidental character. Cohen has achieved this successfully, however, and his film is a testament to his great comic gifts.

As movie budgets get larger and box office takings smaller, American studios continue to ponder what it is they’re doing wrong. They’d be wise to take a leaf out of Korean Cinema’s book, where blockbusters manage to be electrifyingly of-the-moment despite adhering to popular genre convention; where tough-as-nails revenge flicks reside comfortably next to teary-eyed melodramas; and where going to the movies is culturally an event, something Hollywood will never fully realise in the digital age unless it restores the average film-goer’s faith in popcorn and big-screen experience. A mere slither of what the Korean film industry churns out, this year’s Korean Film Festival nevertheless provided an at-a-glance spectrum of this exciting Asian wave. Those in attendance certainly have been appreciative of the small-but-considered programme. CALEB STARRENBURG sampled the full gamut in going from the loud and colossal actioner Typhoon, to the curious and involving drama of Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach. Aside from earlier thoughts on Duelist and The Host (probably the perfect hybrid of event cinema and critical acceptance), TIM WONG also reviewed Woman on the Beach.

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.

Larry David/USA/2005; R4 (2-disc)
Warner Bros, $49.95 | Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

WHEN THE DUST settles from this decade, the 2000s may go down as Television’s Golden Age. While movie studios try to figure out why movie attendance has dropped and conveniently blame DVD piracy, a more likely explanation could be the standard of television is the best it’s ever been – The Sopranos, The Wire, The Office, Little Britain are but a few of some of the rich and glorious talent on TV. Why go out when there’s more talent and richer storytelling at home? United States comedy is also starting to challenge its viewers, even the American version of The Office is pretty good. However, you only have to watch the sheer mediocrity (or far worse) of popular 90s comedy shows like Friends, Home Improvement or Everybody Loves Raymond to actually realise how special a show like Curb Your Enthusiasm is.

For those who still mourn the passing of cult movie institution The Incredible Film Festival, and remain indifferent to its festivalized reincarnate That’s Incredible Cinema, the V 24 Hour Movie Marathon stands as a last bastion for midnight movie disciples in New Zealand. In its sixth installment, it is effectively an entire week’s programme spooled together as one, reeled out continuously from dawn to dusk (to dawn again). This year’s marathon promised a return to the underground of the Incredibly Strange, a trawl through the wasteland of B-pictures, obscure Zombie movies, 80s memorabilia, and Jodorowsky shitting in a bowl. JACOB POWELL donned pajamas to file this report.

A roundup of the current best and rest in DVD. In this installment: Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Fifth Season, Family Guy: Season Five, Little Britain: The Complete Third Series, Miami Vice, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Election, Ballets Russes.

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