Continuing my countdown of last year’s best films…

Best Films of 2025
#5. No Other Choice

I’ve been unemployed for the better part of a year, dealing with all of the uncertainty that comes with being out of a job, so Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice was particularly impactful right now.

The film follows Yoo Man-su (played by Lee Byung-hun), an executive at a paper company who loses his job and goes to extraordinary lengths to land a new one. Desperate and helpless, he takes the concept of eliminating the competition to a whole new level.

Park has always been a brazen, formally daring filmmaker, but he outdoes himself here. His ingenuity shines through in every composition, every transition, every music cue, and every wild story beat. The film offers a dizzying combination of strict formalism and emotional chaos.

This is a not so subtle satire digging into predatory capitalism, patriarchy, and the threat of AI to the workforce. It’s thoroughly South Korean but has universal resonance — I count this as yet another great 2025 film about life in contemporary America, whether it’s set here or not.

The movie is also quite funny, especially if you like your humor on the dark side. Park knows how to milk both tension and laughs out of a set piece, and he serves up some doozies. I named one standout scene among my music moments of the year.

Despite all the laughs and gasps, No Other Choice is ultimately a chilling portrait of a society in decline. Its final images reminded me a lot of the conclusion of Eddington, another movie about how ill-equipped we are to deal with the computer-assisted end of the world.