From Park Chan-wook’s diabolically funny workplace satire No Other Choice to a tear-jerking comeback from Chloé Zhao, here are the films to see this January
No Other Choice
From January 23
Park Chan-wook’s long-gestating passion project is a crushingly brilliant satire of late capitalist workplace anxiety, adapted from Donald E Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax. Family man Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) sees his world fall apart when he loses his cushty middle-management job at a paper factory due to company restructuring. In a turn of events that seems, on the face of it, to promise a return to the ultraviolent stylings of Park’s Vengeance trilogy, he hatches a plan to bump off rival candidates in order to put his career back on track – but nothing goes quite according to plan in this wicked black comedy, which is more in the Hitchcockian mould of The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave than his earlier, bloodier work. Lee excels as a man still getting the hang of murder, and Son Ye-jin is terrific as his wife, Lee Mi-ri, whose discovery of Man-su’s secret prompts some unexpected soul searching of her own. But the main draw here is Park, who continues to cook up ever-more elegant and visually stunning riffs on his signature themes – there’s a jaw dropping moment where Man-su gets drawn into an awkward dance with a factory robot – without losing the subversive lens that makes him such a treasure. And despite the campy premise, No Other Choice makes seriously light work out of a chilling central question: what kind of person does it take to succeed in today’s brave new world of work?
Peter Hujar’s Day
Out now
In 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz had the idea to ask friends from her New York artist milieu to note down all the events from their day, and recount them at length in a taped conversation she would later publish in a book. The project was never realised, though a transcript of her conversation with photographer Peter Hujar, posthumously recognised as one of the era’s greats, was discovered in 2021 and turned into a book of its own. Here, Ira Sachs reconstructs the dialogue – taking the odd artistic liberty along the way – in a pointedly low-stakes but oddly mesmerising drama, skilfully performed by the director’s Passengers collaborator Ben Wishaw (playing Hujar) and Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz. Its appeal lies chiefly in the unguarded approach Hujar took to his assignment, casually spilling the tea on friends and photographic subjects (Susan Sontag! Allen Ginsberg!) in ways that reveal his own powers of perception and occasional blind spots.
Hamnet
From January 9
Bouncing back from her Marvel multiverse debacle with The Eternals, Chloé Zhao emerges with a serious awards season contender in the shape of Hamnet, a heart-wrenching drama about William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s grief at losing their 11-year-old son, drawn from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name. Adapted for the screen by O’Farrell alongside Zhao, the film stars Paul Mescal as El Bard, but it’s Buckley who brings the house down as Hathaway, with the Irish star winning a Critics’ Choice award this week for her performance ahead of a potential tilt at Oscars glory.
Bulk
In selected cinemas from January 15
Whatever happened to Ben Wheatley? The British director aced the early part of his career with blackly comic bangers like Kill List and Sightseers, before falling off a bit with a flat adaptation of High-Rise and the sub-Tarantino caper Free Fire (let’s not even start on Meg 2). Bulk is an attempt to get back to low-budget basics, a sci-fi freakout starring Sam Riley as a man abducted to a Brighton townhouse where every door conceals a portal to the multiverse: deceptively spacious, I guess you’d call it. The plot is pure hokum and serves mostly as an excuse for Wheatley to crank the midnight-movie feels up to 11, from the surreal editing to chase sequences staged using models he made himself, presumably in his garden shed. And if the whole thing feels a little bit slapdash – it’s more Garth Marenghi than Chris Marker, let’s say – it’s still a welcome return to cultish form from the director.
