Most people who have seen a few director Park movies will agree that he has one of the most creative and crazy minds out there. I’m happy to join the choir. This marks the 55-year-old filmmaker’s inaugural foray into the Black comedy subgenre, although we are cognizant of his cheekiness. 

Director Park’s examination of the economic class structures in South Korea, as evidenced by Man-soo’s dismissal, is as bleak as it is in any other urbanized capitalist nation. It is, after all, based on an American novel, but it exploits this premise to build a powerful Black comedy. With No Other Choice‘s straightforward plot, he deconstructs the conventions of masculinity under a capitalistic umbrella through a kooky but always funny atmosphere. One equally funny and depressing recurring gag is post-firing affirmations that many of the unemployed former breadwinners use as an excuse to continue their self-pity wallowing. Man-soo’s dubious scheme reflects himself in his fellow compatriots, who share the same ill fate. They all neglect their loving families, becoming real-time losers to the significant impact of the capitalist culture on the common man. As the plot develops, Park explores the twisted but captivating development of this man regaining his sense of self and spine… You know, through murder. 

As this social satire unfolds in dark, humorous ways, No Other Choice is a rare example of style and substance working together. Director Park throws every stylistic option he can at the wall, and almost everything sticks. Mainly because his imaginative lens – crossfades, dissolves, and memorable feats – is both visually captivating and enriching to Man-soo’s mission. The film encroaches on noir-thriller sensibilities, especially with its modern setting. Man-soo’s choices become more engrossing and inventive, proving timely even in its most familiar beats while personalizing every supporting character. 

Director Park and his reunion with director of photography Kim Woo-hyung from The Little Drummer Girl execute a distinctive vision that flawlessly captures the screwball comedy archetype with its own rhythmic precision and stunning visuals, particularly in contrast to the picturesque autumnal backdrop. Compared to Decision to Leave, it’s more maximalist, but it still makes you think, “Wow, this is how movies should look.” Nevertheless, the meticulous framework and blocking in the numerous chaotic sequences impart a unique dark-comedic tone that evokes a classic comedy from the height of silent era cinema, albeit in stunning Technicolor. 

In an exceptional leading performance, Lee Byung-hun channels his inner Chaplin.

By Peter Keough

Once again, critic A.S. Hamrah sheds perceptive light on our cinematic malaise.

The Algorithm of the Night: Film Criticism 2019-2025 by A.S. Hamrah. n + 1. 554 pages. $23

If film criticism – and film itself – survive the ongoing cultural, political, economic, and technological onslaughts they face, it will be due in part to writers like A. S. Hamrah. His latest collection (there are two, in fact; I have not yet read Last Week in End Times Cinema, but I am sure that it will also be the perfect holiday gift for the dystopic cinephile on your list) picks up where his previous book The Earth Dies Streaming left off, unleashing his savage indignation on today’s fatuous, lazy critical conversations and the vapid studio fodder that sustains it.

Not that it is all negativity. This inexhaustibly illuminating and entertaining assortment of reviews, essays, mordant Oscar roundups, and freewheeling, sui generis bagatelles first seen in such publications as n+1 (for which he is the film critic), The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, and the Criterion Collection is filled with numerous laudatory appreciations of films old and new — all of which you should watch or watch again. I was impressed with his eloquent, insightful praise for Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018), his shrewd analysis of Abbas Kiarostami’s masterpiece A Taste of Cherry (1997) and its mixed critical reaction, and his reassessment of John Sayles’s neglected epic of class warfare Matewan (1987), among many others.

Also not to be missed are Hamrah’s absurdist ventures into his personal life, many in theaters (or not in theaters, as when Covid shut them down in 2020), such as the time he observed a menacing attendee at a screening of 2010’s Joker. “It would be best to see [Joker] in a theater with a potential psychopath for that added thrill of maybe not surviving it,” he concludes. One strikingly admirable characteristic of Hamrah’s criticism is that he consciously avoids writing anything that could be manipulated by a studio into a banal blurb. You will find no “White knuckle thrill ride” or “Your heart will melt” or “A monumental cinematic experience” here.

The book does boast a bounty of blurbable bits, but they are not the kind that any publicist will put in an ad. These are laugh-out-loud takedowns of bad movies, vain filmmakers, and vapid performers. Some of my favorites among these beautiful barbs include his description of The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) as “[S]horter than Wakanda Forever by a whopping 47 minutes but still too long,” his dismissal of Jojo Rabbit (2019) as “combining Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson in the worst, cop-out ways,” and his exasperated take on Edward Berger’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front (“What happened to the German cinema?”).

Film critic A. S. Hamrah — another inexhaustibly illuminating and entertaining assortment of writings on film. Photo: n+1 benefit.

He also displays the rare critical ability to reassess  a director and give him his due. In his review of Berger’s 2024 Conclave, he admits that “Berger directs [it] like he is a totally different filmmaker than the one who made the 2022 version All Quiet on the Western Front. Unlike that film, this one is highly burnished and tightly wound.” (Watch out – close to blurb material there!)

The book ends with an apotheosis of the listicle called “Movie Stars in Bathtubs: 48 Movies and Two Incidents” in which Hamrah summarizes nine decades of cinema. It ranges from Louis Feuillade’s 1916 silent crime serial Les Vampires (“‘It is in Les Vampires that one must look for the great reality of our century’ wrote the surrealists Aragon and Breton”) to Brian De Palma’s 2002 neo-noir Femme Fatale (“There is a picture book called Movie Stars in Bathtubs, but there aren’t enough movie stars in bathtubs. De Palma’s Femme Fatale, which stars Rebecca Romijn, does much to correct that.”)

Around the volume’s midpoint, Hamrah includes one of the two “incidents” of the title. In “1951: The first issue of Cahiers du Cinema” he celebrates the astonishing cadre of cinephiles, many of whom are depicted in Richard Linklater’s recent film Nouvelle Vague, who put out the publication that reinvented an art form. “Unlike critics today,” Hamrah points out, “these writers did not complain that they were powerless. They defended the movies they loved and excoriated the ones they hated. For them film criticism was a confrontation, its goal to change how films were viewed and how they were made.” It’s a tradition that Hamrah, who combines the personal point of view and cultural literacy of James Agee with the historical, contextualizing vision of J. Hoberman, triumphantly embraces.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, including Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

‘The Secret Agent’

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (R)

★★★★

“This is one of the year’s best films, and one of the most distinctive,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. An award winner at Cannes, the sixth feature from Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho is “a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and a re-creation of a time and place,” yet that’s not all. Wagner Moura stars as a young widower on the run who returns to his home city to check on his young son in 1977, during Brazil’s brutal dictatorship. “Murder is everywhere,” a constant threat. But Mendonça is less focused on the violence than how people learn to adapt to it, and “if you’re willing to bend with the story, The Secret Agent will take you places movies rarely go.” Moura, whose
character goes by the alias Marcelo, “carries the film with a star turn of suave determination,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker.