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
Directed by Park Chan-wook (R)
★★★★
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 , is “in his element conducting the media circus and the brainstorming of local cops and FBI,” turning 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 in . 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.