Grand illusions: "Nouvelle Vague"

December's Blue Moon was all about endings: of a partnership, of a career, of a life. Nouvelle Vague - Richard Linklater's second film of 2025, held over for a January release in the UK - concerns the beginnings of things, principally (as that title indicates) the French New Wave. The first of the many funny jokes the new film has to venture is that its protagonist - the young Jean-Luc Godard (played, rather brilliantly, by Guillaume Marbeck), embarking on the twenty-day shoot of his 1960 debut Breathless - believes himself to be yesterday's man: several of his fellow critics at Cahiers du cinéma, including the emergent toast of Cannes François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), have already graduated to making feature films, leaving him holding a mere short in his hands. So this guy has a point to prove. But he also has a funny way of making it: starting from a treatment he doesn't initially seem all that wild about, throwing out the rulebook that had governed how films get made for the best part of fifty years, alarming his American leading lady Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) by making his script up as he goes, and eventually coming to blows with his own exasperated producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). This Godard is a heedless punk who strides out into the world so as to conquer it, or at least to raise merry hell; it's amazing he returns with anything salvageable, let alone a modern classic. "We don't slow down!," he tells his actors as they're nudged and hustled and sometimes yanked from one impromptu set-up to the next. "Film is a revolutionary act!" As Linklater sees it, Breathless wasn't just a title, but an entire state of mind and being.

As with Lorenz Hart, so with Godard: this is a great character to hang a movie on. (To the extent I was initially a little nervous that the scenes where Godard isn't around - those covering the byplay between Seberg, her husband François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noé) and co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), for instance - weren't going to fizz and pop in quite the same way.) He is, to put it mildly, an awkward fucker: blessed with some vision and a gift for phrasemaking and sloganeering, cursed with a thick strain of contrarianism and the loftiness of a Swiss aristocrat. (On Day One, he launches the shoot by declaring "time to enter the pantheon".) The script - by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr., nimbly translated into French by Laetitia Masson and Michèle Pétin - has Godard down as a combination of pickpocket, pinball-playing delinquent and luck-pushing chancer; Linklater doesn't strain the suggestion you may well need elements of all three to become a filmmaker, but it's there nevertheless. Marbeck, for his part, plays him as simultaneously the Godard of film lore, a character in one of the director's own movies (self-mythology being some part of the Godard project) and Rushmore's Max Fischer - and Linklater does appear to be explicitly connecting one wave of independent filmmaking to another. The Academy frame is true to the moment of the New Wave, but also a neat shop window for Wes Anderson-like sight gags and jokes of framing: key personnel are frontally introduced with their names stamped across the image. More broadly, Nouvelle Vague is a film about thrusting young go-getters finding their eye and voice while attempting to communicate something through their art, a theme as applicable to the Paris of 1959 as it was to Austin, Texas thirty years later. This Breathless is rendered much as the films-within-a-film of Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup or Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion were: as something tentative, piecemeal and defiantly DIY, made on the hoof if not on the lam with whatever these creatives found around them.

So where Blue Moon was necessarily bittersweet, Nouvelle Vague is optimistic by nature - indeed, it may well end up as the most optimistic feature any of us will see inside a cinema in 2026. Partly, it's that we know this tale turned out happily for all concerned: Breathless did enter the pantheon, and Godard the revolutionary succeeded in bringing about something new. (It would have been a very different feature had Linklater alighted upon Godard after his rupture from Truffaut and the collapse of his political project in the late 1970s: Nouvelle Vague returns us to Godard at a good time.) But it also captures exactly that life Godard set out to film; it films Paris as Godard filmed Paris. It says a lot about the devaluing of the cinematic art that - despite a Netflix push - neither the film's production design nor its costuming have been recognised during this awards season (where the olde-worlde theme park of Hamnet has repeatedly), and it was a particular feat of casting to assemble actors who, without lapsing into flat impersonation, summon the spirit of both these individuals and their moment. Linklater's footage really does look remarkably like Breathless, or as Breathless would have been shot at the time - but it pulls back appreciably from Godard's singleminded-bordering-on-monomaniacal worldview in favour of a more compassionate and all-embracing perspective. Linklater films Godard as Renoir would have filmed Godard: he sees the youthful visionary, while also acknowledging the giant pain in the arse he might have been from time to time and celebrating the enduring art that he and his comrades created. True, it's a little inside-baseball, or whatever the Parisian equivalent would be. (Inside boules?) But if you have any love for these films, these names, these people, Nouvelle Vague is pure delight: one to show any students about to take their own creative first steps - alors voilà, mes amis, ceci is 'ow you make du cinéma - and the single best trailer Breathless has had in 65-odd years, a film to send you gambolling back to the source. "History gets richer," Truffaut notes late on, in a characteristically gentler attempt to form a Godardian pensée. As these last two films have amply illustrated, it really does when Linklater gets a hold of it.

Nouvelle Vague is now playing in selected cinemas.

"Iron Lung" (Guardian 02/02/26)

Iron Lung **

Dir: Mark Fischbach [aka Markiplier]. With: Mark Fischbach, Caroline Kaplan, Troy Baker, Elsie Lovelock. 127 mins. Cert: 15

Things change, even as William Goldman’s old showbiz maxim continues to apply: nobody still knows anything. The surprise hit of the past weekend wasn’t the much-trumpeted Melania, but a different type of horror movie: the independently financed Iron Lung, smuggled without the usual promotional hoopla into multiplexes, where it was keenly awaited by the massed followers of its Hawaiian writer-director-star Mark Fischbach, better known as YouTube gaming legend Markiplier. Most of us have long sensed culture is making a decisive break with the analogue in favour of the (perhaps terminally) online. Fischbach’s film makes that paradigm shift not just visible but visceral: it feels not unlike spending twelve hours on Twitch with all the curtains closed.

Though Markiplier’s approaching the genre from a notionally fresh angle – in adapting Dave Szymanski’s titular space-submarine sim – he lands on the narratively rusty idea of an astronaut straying beyond his depth: it’s Moon in dimmer light. Beset by ominous rumbles and mounting doubts about the state of mankind, the begrimed and squalid craft singlehandedly piloted by Fischbach’s straggle-haired convict Simon is indistinguishable from the average teenage bedroom; our hero staggers round this intergalactic deathtrap completing vaguely specified missions – ram this, repair that, download something or other – like a harassed dad ticking off his Sunday to-do list. In this, Simon proves more proficient than Fischbach’s offscreen self, either stumped by or oblivious to the film’s fundamental issues.

Hopes of discovering a new Dark Star are soon sunk by the depressive tone, leaden pacing and near-total absence of spectacle; a radio-play script insistently has to tell, because this barebones production has nothing much to show. (The achievement, chiefly entrepreneurial, is almost admirably perverse: Markiplier has steered folks towards content that makes Solaris seem like Con Air.) Even if it takes major Main Character Syndrome to centre yourself for two-plus hours while relegating your co-stars to voices off, Fischbach holds steady before the camera: more money and bigger sets will doubtless come his way. But he can’t pull off the dramatic heavy lifting required here to convert a short’s worth of plot into a beneficial feature. At least Mr. Beast’s stunts get him some occasional fresh air.

Iron Lung is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

In memoriam: Jayasree Kabir (Guardian 29/01/26)

Few performers’ careers have encompassed both discovery by Satyajit Ray and working opposite sometime Likely Lad James Bolam. Yet this was the distinction the actress Jayasree Kabir, who has died aged 73, achieved while shifting between the southern and northern hemispheres as work and family commitments required. Launched while still a teenager in Ray’s 1970 film Pratidwandi/The Adversary, Kabir compiled a modest yet highly selective list of credits, including several key titles of the Bangladeshi cinema, before making her final screen appearance in a 2004 episode of the BBC’s primetime ratings winner New Tricks.

The Adversary – adapted from a Sunil Ganguly novel, and the first film in what became known as Ray’s Calcutta trilogy – found the revered Indian director pulling his cinema in a new direction and shape, seemingly under the influence of early Godard and New Hollywood films. Emerging in the same year as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, to which it suggested an Eastern equivalent, the drama pounded the city’s neon-lit streets in the company of Dhritiman Chatterjee’s Siddhartha, a disillusioned college dropout on a punishing quest for gainful employment and satisfaction besides.

The 17-year-old Kabir, then billed by her maiden name Jayasree Roy, was cast as Keya, the wide-eyed family friend who calls a passing Siddhartha into her family’s home to repair a blown fuse, briefly lifts the clouds from the protagonist’s head (“what is the point of seeing the darker side of everything?”) and offers him renewed reason to persist, even as he’s finally driven into exile. Her beguiling stillness contrasted with her swain’s restless agitation: as Kabir later told the writer Bulbul Hasan, Ray “expected precision, but he also made you feel that the camera would capture exactly what you offered — nothing more, nothing less.”

The film proved a success, winning three prizes at India’s National Film Awards, including Best Director and Screenplay for Ray. (It was also voted the second best Indian film of that year, after the Kannada social drama Samskara.) Yet Kabir admitted that this professional breakthrough owed a great deal to chance. 

She had been born in Calcutta on June 22, 1952; towards the end of her studies at the city’s South Point School, she entered the Miss Calcutta beauty pageant on a whim – “the event was being held in [the restaurant] Firpo’s, where my father had taken me for dinner” – and promptly won, catching Ray’s eye during his search for new faces.“Winning Miss Calcutta opened doors,” Kabir recalled, “but it was only a beginning. Cinema demanded something different — something deeper. I was fortunate to meet remarkable people early on.” 

In the wake of The Adversary, she continued to work in the Bengali-language cinema, appearing in Dinen Gupta’s Ajker Nayak/Today’s Hero (1972) and opposite local star Samit Bhanja in Ajit Lahiri’s Ek Bindu Sukh/One Point Happiness (1977). Yet her most important films of this period were made in conjunction with the Bangladeshi critic-turned-director Alamgir Kabir, whom she met through Ray and married in 1975. 

After collaborating on Surjo Konna/Daughter of the Sun (1975), a romantic fantasy about an artist looking for love, the pair began work on the enduring Shimana Periye/Across the Fringe (1977), a riff on Lina Wertmuller’s Marxist melodrama Swept Away (1974), which saw Jayasree’s privileged Tina wash up on a desert island opposite a lowly boatman in the wake of a cyclone. The film was a notable success, winning four awards at Bangladesh’s National Film Awards; Jayasree’s lipsynched performance of the keening love song “Bimurto Ei Ratri Amar” – written by Bhupen Hazarika, sung by Abida Sultana – passed into regional cinematic legend.  

A further success followed with the urban corruption drama Rupali Shaikate/The Loner (1979), yet the pair’s personal and professional bonds had begun to fray. Upon separating from her husband, Jayasree left Dhaka to return to Calcutta, before uprooting to East London with Shourov, her son by Kabir; in the UK, she initially supported herself by teaching English at a higher-education college and providing voiceover work for the BBC and Channel 4. It was while in England that she learnt of her husband’s death, after a 1989 accident in which his car was pushed off a ferry by a speeding truck.

Adapting to British life proved a challenge, as she recalled in a 2003 interview: “I had cut myself off from acting and the media… I was finding it difficult to juggle a demanding career [while] bringing up my son as a single parent. Now, with my son settled in his career, I can consider projects which have long been buried in my mind.” She went on to take two further supporting roles on British TV: in the BBC’s white-nationalism drama England Expects (2004) and in “Painting on Loan”, the second ever episode of New Tricks, where she appeared huddled and scarified – and speaking Bengali – as the victim of a racist firebombing.

Thereafter, Jayasree shied away from the spotlight, although she maintained a regular presence at and eventually became a patron of the Rainbow International Film Festival – held annually at the Genesis cinema in Mile End – where she kept a watchful and nurturing eye on cinematic developments in her former homeland; as late as a 2010 interview, she noted “it shouldn't be difficult to improve the standard of Bangladeshi films with the aid of technology. Young filmmakers need to take the initiative towards that end.”

She is survived by Shourov.

Jayasree Kabir, actress, born June 22, 1952, died January 12, 2026.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 23-25, 2025):

1 (2) The Housemaid (15)

2 (3) Hamnet (12A) **

3 (1) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

4 (4) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

5 (6) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

6 (5) Marty Supreme (15) ***

7 (new) Saipan (15)

8 (new) No Other Choice (15) ****

9 (new) Mercy (12A)

10 (new) Return to Silent Hill (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Nouvelle Vague

2. No Other Choice

3. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

4. The History of Sound

5. The Voice of Hind Rajab

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (10) Sinners (15) ****

2 (4) 28 Years Later (15) ****

3 (1) Wicked: For Good (PG)

4 (2) The Running Man (15) **

5 (3) Predator: Badlands (12) **

6 (6) Dracula (15)

7 (9) One Battle After Another (15) ****

8 (17) Black Phone 2 (18)

9 (new) Bugonia (15) **

10 (8) Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. One Battle After Another

2. Roofman

3. Sketch

4. F1: The Movie

5. Cloud

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. A Matter of Life and Death (Saturday, BBC Two, 12.40pm)

2. Name Me Lawand (Thursday, Channel 4, 2.50am)

3. The Man Who Would Be King [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 3.20pm)

4. Till (Wednesday, BBC Two, 11.30pm)

5. Shaun the Sheep Movie (Saturday, BBC One, 2.10pm)

One more chance: "Is This Thing On?"

The third and least persuasive of Bradley Cooper's films about performers and performance (after 2018's A Star is Born and 2023's Maestro), Is This Thing On? also serves, as you may be aware, as an origin story for the comedian John Bishop. This instantly poses a minor problem for British viewers, who may start to hear whatever jokes there are in this tale of an accidental stand-up both in star Will Arnett's wheedling baritone and Bishop's vibrant Scouse. (They may also recall Bishop once took a highish-profile acting gig himself in Ken Loach's semi-forgotten Route Irish.) The theme Cooper and Arnett (who co-writes, riffing on his friend Bishop's early career) are pursuing is how certain men express themselves. Arnett's protagonist Alex is a middle-aged sadsack - even his fringe seems aimless, set to "floppy masculinity" - who drifts into a New York comedy club upon separating from wife Tess (Laura Dern); he takes his first steps along the tightrope of open-mic comedy principally to avoid paying a steep cover charge. Earning the nickname "sad guy" from his peers on account of his heart-on-sleeve material, he fumbles his way towards something like proficiency, and eventually comes to have the conversations he should have had with his wife over the 25 years of their relationship, earning himself a second chance at love. If that sounds a little route-one even for a multiplex-bound romcom, well, it is: the tryhard Cooper of Maestro is here replaced by Cooper the people-pleaser, giving the audience the happy ending they might seek of a Friday or Saturday night. Is This Thing On? is ultimately to John Bishop what 2013's One Chance was to the Britain's Got Talent winner Paul Potts; this being Hollywood, however, Bishop gets his mate Will Arnett to play him, where Potts had to settle for James Bloody Corden.

It's on all right, in that Cooper is alert to passing comedy-club detail, and to how two grown-ups with a child to raise might fill their days and nights in the wake of a separation. But is it funny? Not as funny as Judd Apatow's underrated Funny People, for one, a film that approached the same milieu (and much the same male midlife crisis) with plentiful gags scribbled over its sweaty palms. Alex's routines are forever more heartfelt than fully hilarious, and Cooper has to resort to blundering on himself to try and up the laugh rate, playing a klutzy actor apparently going by the name Balls. His film subscribes to the same therapised idea of stand-up that resulted in Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, a comedy special that was funny only up to a point; though several real-life stand-ups appear alongside Alex, the film isn't especially interested in the comedy club as a place where jokes are told, rather as a community where people can find one another, maybe even themselves. This script makes that tricky process seem very easy, though; the appreciable complications of A Star Is Born and Maestro are notable by their absence here. Maybe Bishop's other half really did walk by chance into a club where the comic was pouring out his heart; in a movie, however, it comes over as purest Hollywood hokum. (Cooper might have got away with this once, but he later pulls the same trick with Alex's dad Ciaran Hinds: it's amazing how many people with no stated interest in comedy just happen to drop by this club and pay this cover charge at the exact moment Alex is onstage making amends.) Likewise, when Alex and Tess's twenty-five years of (minor) relationship grievances finally get addressed, it's in one neat and tidy conversation, the movie's own tight five. (At least Marriage Story had someone punch through a wall.) When Is This Thing On? isn't being blandly placid - two nice folks shruggingly call it a day, shruggingly try other things, then shruggingly reunite - it can seem pretty flimsy and trifling: a sweet little anecdote that hasn't quite been scaled up to become a satisfying movie. In 2026, no-one would expect a studio movie to align with the Louis CK view of comedy-cellar and divorced-dad life, but Arnett is more Lennie Bennett than Lenny Bruce; faced with this silly-haired sap, working through his woes without providing any substantial laughs in return, it's a miracle this New York crowd don't boo or bottle him off. Even they're too nice.

Is This Thing On? is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Devo"

You might expect Chris Smith's documentary on the wacky, borderline cartoonish New Wave funsters Devo to be all wacky, borderline cartoonish fun times. Not so: barely ten minutes have passed before we find founder members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh recalling how their outlook was shaped by being on campus during the Kent State massacre of 1970. Like their fellow students, these were kids born into that post-War idyll, raised to believe the future was theirs, only to find themselves coming of age in an America where everything appeared to be going murderously backwards. (Heaven knows how today's kids are supposed to relate.) So the pals invented a philosophy of their own - de-evolution - collaged together from cult texts, old movies, cool images and odd sounds, intended either to meet the moment head-on or blow a giant raspberry in the moment's direction. Whether it made sense or not was a moot point: did Nixonism make any sense, or Vietnam, or Kent State? The whole endeavour was far out from the off. Smith has dug up footage of the group's first college gig, wherein Mothersbaugh proceeded to play a self-described "headache solo" for the first fifteen minutes, whittling a crowd of twenty down to just two; the tyre factory workers of their native Akron, Ohio soon chased Devo off the local bar scene, angered by their refusal to play conventional blues covers. (A later, skittering Stones deconstruction would be as far as they travelled in that direction.) They were arguably lucky to get a leg up into the business at the moment of punk and post-punk, when heads were being expanded and rulebooks ripped up. Suddenly anything was possible again - and yet, even then, Devo came to occupy a curious position in American pop culture.

They were anti-punk, for starters: thinkers rather than snarlers, more nerd than jock. The band's unlikely guest appearances on the late-night talkshow circuit, collated here, reveal they weren't burn-it-all-down nihilists but sometime poptimists who'd actually been given reason to believe in something: a better, brighter future for all. They bamboozled the industry's suits, at this point more accustomed to selling Boston and Bad Company records. But their fellow artists got them, which helped: illustrious boosters included Bowie, Iggy, Lennon, even the relatively straight-edged Neil Young, who cast the band in one of his fillums. The public, for their part, were largely perplexed, ignoring the subversive undercurrents of the musically irresistible "Whip It" to make it a big hit in the US (in the UK, it barely registered either on radio playlists or the charts), but then looking on somewhat askance, as if Devo were a joke they didn't entirely get. Sustained commercial success was therefore beyond them, but they found some sort of niche after the newfangled MTV revealed this merry band of pranksters as fully-formed visual artists; stumbled across on the outer reaches of the cable dial, they might have seemed like a new Spiders from Mars, aliens who'd landed at the right time in the right place to disrupt and otherwise undermine the heavily commercialised dumbness and reactionary nostalgia of Ronald Reagan's America. Smith now encourages the group's surviving contingent to interrupt the Netflix schedule of fear-sowing true crime, fatuous comedy specials and flimsy, instantly forgettable stunts in order to report back on the failure of their initial mission.

For a while, Devo were able to fold their own co-option by the mainstream back into their work: the closer they got to the heart of showbusiness, the more de-evolution they could identify, record and lampoon. The camera withdraws from an apparently fractious press call where the message is "we're not having any fun right now" to reveal the messengers of the band are, to a man, reclining on beanbags. Create your own world and your own logic, as Devo did, and you can either stand to the side of or hover above everybody else's. They remain a fascinating study for what they had to say about America: as the country passed all too rapidly from its civil rights era through deindustrialisation to adopt a new, wholesome corporate-lifestyle sheen, the music - all riddles and puns, slogans and sightgags, boneheaded riffs and banal repetitions - took on the air of a Dadaist commentary on the backwardness of things. (There was no immediate British equivalent: you'd have to mash up elements of Madness, the Art of Noise, Half Man Half Biscuit and the Fall - and a little of the KLF's self-mythologising - to get close.) Almost as interesting is what these refuseniks in silly hats have to say about pop itself: that it can be simultaneously smart and dumb, conceptual and lowbrow, that it often gets into your head by punching up from your gut. These now-seasoned musicians are better placed than their dorky former selves to evaluate the band's ambitions and ideas, and to express their disappointment at the way this project - and the world that went unchanged by it, de-evolving now for a full half-century - turned out. But it's not all bad news: Devo generated a whole archive's worth of funny, peculiar, provocative images and sounds, just waiting for the right filmmaker to raid it. Smith's very engaging retrospective ends with a Max Ernst quote that doesn't at all feel out of place, and it's also the only corner of Netflix where you're going to find trace remnants of a Bruce Conner film: 1978's Mongoloid, no less.

Devo is now streaming via Netflix.

Headhunters: "No Other Choice"

The new Park Chan-wook thriller No Other Choice is notable as a further development in East-West cinematic relations: it finds the director and his now-regular Canadian collaborator Don McKellar adapting the US author Donald E. Westlake's bloody job-market satire The Ax in ways that reflect local Korean customs while also chiming with international cinemagoers whose day jobs are threatened by the AI the powers-that-be are presently pushing down our throats. It's teachable in how it sets up the entire basis of its two hour twenty minute plot in two early sequences. Park opens with a portrait of a family: salaryman dad tending a barbecue on the rolling lawn outside his expensive-looking home, his wife delighting in the chi-chi shoes he's bought for her, two model children rhyming with the family's two adorable golden retrievers. Early autumn leaves confetti over a sunkissed scene of bliss that will never quite be the same again; when we return to it late on - Park remaining, as ever, a stickler for evocative visual symmetries - it will be pissing it down with rain, one of those children will have been exposed as a delinquent, and dad will have buried a corpse under that lawn. Sequence two is a study of a workplace characterised by threat above all else: heavy machinery encouraged to operate at giddying fairground speed in the pursuit of greater productivity and profits, perishable men in overalls - the most vulnerable part of the whole enterprise - standing round below, oblivious to the fact they're in the process of being laid off by this paper factory's American owners. You immediately know why Lee Byung-hun's just-fired Yoo Man-su embarks upon a kill-crazy rampage in a bid to protect the lifestyle (and, just perhaps, the people) he loves; cause, effect and stakes are all established inside ten minutes.

Getting the plot out of the way allows Park to start having fun; indeed, there are long stretches in No Other Choice where you may be persuaded that no-one in world cinema is currently having more fun doing their job than Park Chan-wook. After the romantic agonies of 2022's Decision to Leave, the new film is baroque in a different, distinct way: it's a deluxe snakes-and-ladders board, and this filmmaker is moving all the pieces around. Initially, there is humiliation and debasement, as Man-su tries, with little success, to re-enter the job market, only to see less worthy individuals promoted in his place. (Again, Park puts all this on screen with admirable economy: often it requires one scene, and sometimes merely one gesture, to set these rat bastards up.) Then there begins the blackly comic revenge, as Man-su adopts murder as his new nine-to-five, identifying and taking out all those who might now stand between himself and gainful employment. (Becoming, in effect, his own kind of headhunter.) In these setpieces, Park seems to have metabolised Frank Tashlin's live-action cartoons and many, many miles of comic strip, the better to tell this story in predominantly visual fashion. Take Man-su's plan to brain one rival using a pot plant dropped from the roof above: the pot plants get bigger and bigger, the weightiest among them drips water all over the protagonist's head and face, and it never gets dropped anyway because Man-su is interrupted, at his fullest extension, by the plants' greenfingered keeper, a disapproving old woman with a hall-of-fame disapproving old woman face. 

At times like these, we seem to be watching a high-functioning filmmaker amusing himself, making thrillers for the hell of it. Park cannot shoot two characters walking through the woods without introducing a third party blundering through the back of frame; he converts the humdrum sight of a car reversing out of a parking spot into a symphony of crunched gears; and he pulls off something both mischievous and mysterious with the idea of an apple tree planted in a fertiliser bed of human carcass and stolen iPhones. (You fear for the fruit, while also wondering whether this is just an elaborate dad gag involving the word apple.) It's all (just about) related to the plot; still, very few filmmakers would fill in this plot like this. Park, too, has no other choice: he's impelled to fashion rich, textured images, to set images atop images, or images within images, as when Man-su's wife (Son Ye-jin) Facetimes her husband at the exact moment a stranger is sucking the poison from a snakebite on his calf. (Again, it has something to do with the plot; it also confirms a suspicion, born while watching Decision to Leave, that no-one has thought more extensively and more rewardingly than Park about how to integrate cellphone technology into our movies.) No other filmmaker currently working is more committed to giving their audience more for their money on a frame-by-frame basis - I'm excluding James Cameron, currently trapped in a cycle (of his own making) of giving us more of the same - but the risk is that a film like this becomes clotted, that the mechanisms of the thriller get bunged up with such ebullient imagemaking. You will, in short, see many more streamlined thrillers in 2026. (Why, there's a new Jason Statham vehicle out this very Friday.)

There are points where No Other Choice begins to seem farcical, somewhat overblown: the first assassination sequence, set to deafening rock music, climaxes in three squabbling characters simultaneously reaching for the gun that's tumbled under a sideboard. (And also yields the image that best encapsulates Park's millefeuille of imagery: our assassin is wearing a plastic glove under a regular glove, with an oven glove on top of that.) At other times, it can seem surfacey, a mere doodle, where Decision to Leave layered up the mysteries of human desire. Yet this narrative does wind its way towards landing a serious and substantial point: Man-su finds out - the hard way - that those he's setting out to slaughter are really not so unlike him, being sadsacks and drunkards, unreliable providers who've spent much of their working lives being screwed over by a system that does not give a shit. If they banded together - as they threaten to in places - they could help each other out, whether to form a support group or the union we hear being discussed in the opening moments. But capitalism - with its mechanisms of need and greed - has conspired to set them against one another; these men end up as divided as Korea itself, or the US, or indeed the UK. The title is internalised rhetoric, passed down from management to labour along with the pink slip and the P45: you can, it seems, remove the man from the system, but you can only take the system out of the man in the same way you can extract a rotten wisdom tooth - with much effort and pain, and possibly a large pair of pliers. That's still quite a lot to pull out of a night at the movies, and it stems from the legibility of these images, both in terms of their framing (cf: one painterly shot of a curving, leaf-strewn path leading down to a getaway car) and in the narrative information Park has to impart to carry this twisted tale from A to B. No Other Choice probably won't linger as long in the mind as Decision to Leave, but it's a hell of a lot of fun while it lasts: a filmmaker operating close to the peak of his storytelling powers, elbowing his way back into our consciousness with a well-constructed, superlatively illustrated joke.

No Other Choice is now playing in selected cinemas.