Film reviews: ‘No Other Choice,’ ‘Dead Man’s Wire,’ and ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’
A victim of downsizing turns murderous, an angry Indiana man takes a lender hostage, and a portrait of family by way of three awkward gatherings
‘No Other Choice’
Directed by Park Chan-wook (R)
★★★★
Park Chan-wook’s “mordantly hilarious” new comedy “skewers capitalism with much of the same wit, sadness, and slapstick buffoonery that made Parasite so resonant,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Squid Game villain Lee Byung-hun stars as a laid-off paper company veteran who’s so desperate to preserve his family’s upper-middle-class existence
that he schemes to murder the other contenders for his potential bounce-back job. “Plotted with ornate precision but unfolding with
the panic of a desperate man,” the latest Korean-language feature from the director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden is “a slaphappy movie with a surprisingly powerful sting.” Because Lee’s character is such an incompetent killer, No Other Choice “plays like a vicious episode of Looney Tunes,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com.
At the same time, “Lee is at his career-best here, deftly walking a tightrope of likability, relatability, and morbid humor” as this brilliantly shot film gradually transforms from “almost silly” to something far darker. Still, despite its fierce anti-capitalist message, the movie remains “an amusing caper, not a stern lecture,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. Though it’s “easily half an hour too long,” fattened by “irrelevant asides and digressions,” it “isn’t particularly heavy-handed in its disdain for corporations.” Instead, it’s “a sly slay-fest, with an appropriately mordant ending,” one that will unnerve anyone who’s fearful of what AI and automation will do to the jobs that provide so many of us with our sense of worth and identity.
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‘Dead Man’s Wire’
Directed by Gus Van Sant (R)
★★★
Gus Van Sant’s first feature in seven years has “the breezily watchable feel” of a movie you might catch on Sunday-afternoon cable TV, said Marshall Shaffer in The Playlist. “A well-oiled machine,” Dead Man’s
Wire dramatizes a real-life 1977 incident in which an Indianapolis mortgage broker was held hostage by a man named Tony Kiritsis who believed the company had sabotaged his attempt to finally make a few bucks. Portrayed here as “both bumbling and brilliant,” Kiritsis won his bid to air his grievances on national TV, all while keeping a shotgun wired to his captive’s neck in a way that ensured instant death if anyone
intervened.
A “crackling” lead performance by Bill Skarsgard carries this small-scale thriller, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. But Colman Domingo also shines as a “magnetically cool” DJ whose effort to defuse the crisis helps turn the standoff into a three-day national story. Van Sant, whose commercial breakthrough came with 1995’s To Die For, is “in his element conducting the media circus and the brainstorming of local cops and FBI,” turning Dead Man’s Wire into “a timely, entertaining reflection on the way the offer of the American dream often tends to be snatched back.” It’s troubling, though, that the movie fudges some facts about the case to fit the director’s populist vision, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Dead Man’s Wire is clearly “Van Sant’s most vital piece of work for the big screen in some time,” but there’s no evidence that the mortgage company snookered Kiritsis, and pretending it did unfairly alters the drama we’re shown.
‘Father Mother Sister Brother’
Directed by Jim Jarmusch (R)
★★★
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“Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother finds the director in a minor key, which is sometimes his best key,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Like such Jarmusch “masterpieces” as 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise and 2016’s Paterson, this Venice film festival award winner mines the mundane for humor and emotional effect. Even so, “it’s much more stripped down and oblique,” a quiet triptych in which each of the
parts is a snapshot of a “disarmingly spare” family get-together. The movie is “funniest at the start,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast, as Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, and Tom Waits co-star in a chapter about two adult siblings who during a rare visit with their semi-reclusive and untrustworthy father engage in “the sort of small talk that strains to fill a vacuum.”
The second part then dials up the despondent mood, as sisters portrayed
by Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps visit the Dublin home of their prim novelist mom, played by Charlotte Rampling. Unfortunately, Jarmusch “leans heavily into wistfulness” in the third segment, in which Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play adult twins visiting the Paris apartment of their recently deceased parents. Here, “the overtly melancholy tone is more than the wispy action can shoulder.” For me, that third segment and the first are “the most convincing as portraits of real life,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Still, throughout this “deeply pleasing” film, you wait in vain for a crisis or confrontation to arrive and instead experience only “contentment and calm,” a Zen-like acceptance of life’s chance relationships that serves as “a cleansing of the moviegoing palate.”