Weekend Watchlist, 4/24: Cost

Happy Friday everyone! Check out my review for the underwhelming new fight movie Beast, if you haven't yet.

Here are this week’s picks.

No Other Choice

Where to watch: Hulu

Director Park Chan-wook’s latest thriller premiered on Hulu this weekend, and if you haven’t seen it yet, what are you waiting for? A tense and darkly hilarious time, No Other Choice is the second film adaptation of Donald Westlake's The Ax (after Costas Gavras’ film 20 years earlier), following a laid-off papermaking employee (Lee Byung-hun) who turns to drastic measures when his prolonged search for a new job reaches desperation. Park’s previous triumph Decision to Leave, a romantic murder mystery, is also leaving Hulu at the end of the month (April 30 is your last day to watch it). Both movies are excellent, so pick one (or both!) and have a great time.

A Jafar Panahi movie

Where to watch: Criterion Channel

Three movies by the brilliant Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi are leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, so I’ve been trying to catch up on some of his work. Those movies, all created during Panahi’s ban from filmmaking in Iran, span from documentary (This Is Not a Film), docufiction (Taxi), and fiction (3 Faces). We recently watched This Is Not a Film, and the experience truly felt like witnessing a miracle – in part that the film exists at all and was able to be viewed globally, but also largely because the film itself suddenly coheres because of a chance event in the last 30 minutes. Panahi is a truly one-of-one filmmaker, and you can’t go wrong with any of these three options.

Marty Supreme

Where to watch: HBO Max

The conversation around Marty Supreme during awards season ended up getting skewed towards silly drama around ballet, but don’t let that distract you from one of the year’s most exciting and propulsive movies. It doesn’t quite match the soaring highs of Uncut Gems (what can?), but Marty Supreme is a searing examination of the perils of ambition, with a career-best performance from Timothée Chalamet as a talented dirtbag who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “quit.” Or the words “professional table tennis is not a viable career path in America.”