Today's most innovative fight scenes come from beyond the precincts of Hollywood action. This show-stopping corridor fight in Korean director Park Chanwook's Oldboy (2003) is already near-legendary—to watch this after trying to figure out what's happening between Batman and the Joker is something like going back to Astaire and Rogers after watching Renee Zellwegger and Richard Gere in Chicago.

Fight scenes play on the spectator's dual need for illusion and authenticity. And precisely for that reason, great fight scenes, like Park's one-take wonder, tend to be at once believable and beyond belief. The choreography is intricate and meticulous enough to be convincing, but the scene also calls attention to its artificiality, with sly allusions to the side-scrolling vantage of beat-'em-up video games and the blatant proscenium framing. (To shoot from this "impossible" angle literally required the demolition of the fourth wall.)