Venice: Park Chan-wook's "No Other Choice"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice...

NO OTHER CHOICE

In 2005, Costa-Gavras adapted Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax into Le Couperet, a stark meditation on the cruelty and dehumanization embedded in the modern workplace. Nearly two decades later, Park Chan-wook returns to the same source material with No Other Choice, dedicating the film to Gavras, and in doing so asserting himself once more as one of the most audacious and precise filmmakers alive. Here is a director capable of merging Korean cultural specificity with an elegance of cinematic form so distinctive that only he could achieve it—where narrative, composition, and moral complexity are intertwined to such an extent that a single viewing can scarcely contain their richness.

At the center is Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), head of a company producing security and specialty papers, who finds himself suddenly dispossessed of the only role matching his qualifications...

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South Korean Film Awards & the Oscar Race

by Nathaniel R

THE UGLY... one of 19 films competing to become the Oscar submission

Since we've just starting hearing about Oscar submission decisions from the 100+ countries that Oscar invites to participate each year, let's talk about a country that wisely invested in their own arts, with both deregulation and regulation tactics (reducing government censorship whilst protecting home-grown cinema from Hollywood dominance via screen quotas) for the past couple of decades. The results have been impressive and South Korean entertainment is big in multiple countries now, including the US. While their cinema has been popular and lauded for some time, the American Oscars haven’t quite come around, with the sole exception of Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite (2019). It helped that Parasite had a) absolutely exquisite timing of festivals-to-theater-to-awards pipeline and b) was easy to spot as an instant classic / masterpiece. The former is hard (though not impossible) to manage and the latter is exceedingly rare! 

We suspect that Oscar’s resistance to South Korean cinema has to do with the Academy's general genre-aversion...

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New Oscar Charts: Can Norway finally win "Best International Feature Film"?

by Nathaniel R

possible submissions from Japan & Norway

Counterintuitively, we begin this year's April Foolish Predictions (two months late --- woot!) with a category for which we currently have no proof of eligibility for. No country that competes in Oscar's annual Best International Feature Film category has (yet) announced their submission. But we do know, from past experiences, that many of the submissions each year will have premiered at film festivals ranging from last fall in 2024 through the fall of 2025. So we looked at recent editions of Sundance, Berlinale, and Cannes for clues. This is great fun to do as anything is possible this early; you don't even need a US distributor to compete (though of course it doesn't hurt)...

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What Director to Rank Next?

by Cláudio Alves

I don't know about you, but I had a lot of fun ranking Hayao Miyazaki's feature filmography. So much so that I feel inspired to do the same with some other beloved auteur. The only issue is deciding which director to rank next. In those write-ups, a commenter suggested David Lynch, so he's on the list of candidates, but there are many more possibilities, storied careers full of fascinating films. Why not put it to a readers' vote and let you choose who you wish to read about? That's exactly what we're doing, and you have ten possibilities to choose from, all of which have works I love and a filmography small enough to be manageable…

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30 Biggest Subtitled Hits (and where to watch them)

Our daily "Year in Review" lists have begun!

Even before the pandemic, box office reporting was becoming more secretive. Netflix was the chief disruptor since their Oscar hopefuls got theatrical releases but numbers were never reported. Other streaming distributors followed and once you added in the increasing regularity of movies simultaneously doing theatrical (generally reported) and VOD (generally not reported) it was chaos. The COVID-19 pandemic was the ultimate disruptor of course, changing global viewing habits, by virtue of Father Time. International cinema in the US has been increasingly demoted to streaming-only since adult audiences have been the toughest to lure back to the theaters. That said there are subtitled pictures that played theatrically this year and we wanted to honor them by noting the success stories...

Curiously the only foreign country that habitually reports big box office numbers in the US is India but those numbers are often reported as "estimates" in the way, say, European titles didn't tend to be. Furthermore Indian pictures, RRR being an obvious exception, don't tend to get much US media coverage even though they sell tickets, at least in specific areas of the country which makes it all kind of confusing in terms of "what is a success?".  But here are the numbers that were reported, some surely more accurately than others. The numbers are primarily drawn from two sites (box office mojo and the numbers). Titles with up arrows are still in theaters 

TOP 33 SUBTITLED HITS OF 2022 AT THE US BOX OFFICE
Rank for the calendar year / Movie Title / $ Estimate Domestic Gross / $ Global Gross
Figures updated as of 01/15/23

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