No Other Choice (2025) ***

 

What first turned me onto this film is that it is based on a novel by Donald Westlake. The Ax tells the tale of a mid-level manager with technical expertise in a shrinking industry who gets laid off. Eager to get back to work, he finds that every time a job in his field becomes available, there are a handful of unemployed guys with his same skill set hustling for it. As the months go by and his joblessness takes a toll on his family, he hatches a plot to murder the other similarly-skilled men, so that he can get the next job that opens up. It's a dark story with moments of dark humor. It's a high-wire act for Donald Westlake to occasionally inject his trademark sense of humor into what is really a horrible tale about the people left behind by capitalism and progress. As I recall, he manages to pull it off.

Park Chan-wook (“The Handmaiden” “Oldboy”) follows Westlake's plot surprisingly closely in his Korean adaptation of the story. Lee Byung-hun (“Squid Game”) does a fine job as the desperate anti-hero. I will say that Park struggles a bit with the tone. His unemployed manager's inexpert efforts at murder create some madcap scenes of comedy that are a poor fit with the theme of good, family men murdering each other over a job. Still it's a good watch and a good story about the human cost of technological progress – a good fit for the zeitgeist in the era of AI anxiety. (This isn't the first film adaptation of this story, by the way. There is apparently a 2005 French film called “Le Couperet.” Maybe I'll check it out!)

One other thing, and this isn't limited to this movie: everybody yells a lot. This seems to be a feature of Asian films in general. Characters frequently yell and act in a campy, exaggerated way. And yet, in real life here in the U.S., the Asian people I know tend to be chill and on the quiet side. What's up with that?

3 stars out of 5

Bugonia (2025) ****

 

This was one of 2025's Oscar nominated films that I hadn't gotten around to watching yet. I guess I was put off by the weird title and the image of Emma Stone's shaved head. I finally resolved to do my homework, and I'm glad I did.

Stone plays Michelle, a Big Pharma CEO who speaks corporate speak and wants to be the kind of leader who puts values over profits, but at the end of the day, she's just the biggest cog in a machine. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) are cousins who blame that machine for their sad, low-rent lives. Teddy pressures Don, who is developmentally-delayed, to help him kidnap Michelle. His motive is not ransom or even murder, however. Teddy is convinced that Michelle is one of many aliens who live among us, secretly running and destroying the world. The cousins kidnap Michelle, shave her head (to keep her from signaling her mother-ship), and attempt to negotiate Earth's fate with her, while Michelle just tries to figure out how to survive.

“Bugonia” is an English-language remake of the South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos ("Poor Things"), with a screenplay by Will Tracy ("The Menu"), the film has a strong pedigree of dark comedy, and it lives up to it. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone (even with her shaved head) are riveting. Stavros Halkias ("Let's Start a Cult") puts in an excellent, nuanced supporting performance. I'd say Aidan Delbis steals the show, though. Delbis is autistic himself, and his conflicted portrayal of Don, who is torn between his conscience and his loyalty to his cousin, is heartbreaking.

As for that weird title, it's a nod to the film's environmental themes. Bugonia was supposedly an ancient Greek folk practice in which farmers would sacrifice an ox, believing that bees would spontaneously generate from its corpse.

4 stars out of 5

With “Bugonia”, I have watched the majority of last year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture. It may be tough to complete the list. “The Secret Agent” looks okay, so I'll probably check it out. “Hamnet” looks long and boring, and I really don't feel compelled to watch that Timothee Chalamet movie about ping-pong. I mean, maybe if it were pickle-ball!

Fackham Hall (2025) ***

 

Everyone who watches TV or has read Jane Austen knows that British landed estates can only pass to a legitimate male heir. Thus, a lord without a son faces the prospect of his wife and daughters being kicked out of the family mansion upon his death, so that a brother or nephew can take over the lordship. The only solution, apparently, is to marry one of those daughters off to the inheriting nephew, thus keeping everything in the family, so to speak. This is why those old paintings of British royalty feature such, ahem, distinctive jawlines.

Variations on this theme have formed the backbone of many a British, period drama, with “Downton Abbey” being a recent example. “Fackham Hall” is a broad sendup of these dramas. This silly farce features all the archetypes: the slutty daughter, the smart daughter, the haughty cousin/heir, the poor orphan with a mysterious past. These characters ham it up, delivering rapid fire jokes reminiscent of “The Naked Gun.”

What “Fackham Hall” lacks in comedic refinement, it makes up in quantity. The jokes are fired at us non-stop out of a machine-gun of broad, British wit. The theory is that if you aren't laughing at the last joke, you'll laugh at the next, which comes right on top of it, or maybe at the next one. It mostly works. The film isn't a comedy classic, but if you have ever watched a British period drama, you'll get the satire and at least a few chuckles out of it.

3 stars out of 5