{"id":187234,"date":"2025-08-30T11:56:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T11:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/187234\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T11:56:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T11:56:09","slug":"park-chan-wooks-no-other-choice-gets-8-1-2-minute-venice-ovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/187234\/","title":{"rendered":"Park Chan-Wook\u2019s \u2019No Other Choice\u2019 Gets 8 1\/2-Minute Venice Ovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPark Chan-wook<\/a>\u2019s No Other Choice<\/a>, which marks the Korean filmmaker\u2019s first time playing in the Venice<\/a> Film Festival competition, scored an 8 1\/2-minute ovation Friday after the jet-black comedy thriller\u2019s world premiere.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 12th movie from the Oldboy, Handmaiden and Decision to Leave writer-director is based on the 1997 novel\u00a0The Ax\u00a0by Donald Westlake and follows a man (Squid Game\u2018s Lee Byung-hun<\/a>) who is abruptly laid off by the paper company where he worked tirelessly for 25 years. He grows increasingly desperate in his hunt for new work.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe crowd\u2019s response tonight in the Sala Grande was enthusiastic, which left Park looking pleased during the ovation. The fans were noisiest for sure for Lee, the Squid Game star.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie also stars Son Yejin<\/a> (The Last Princess), Park Hee-soon (My Name), Lee Sung-min (The Spy Gone North), Yeom Hye-ran (The Glory), Cha Seung-won (Believer) and Yoo Yeon-seok (Mr. Sunshine).<\/p>\n

\n\tIn his review<\/a>, Deadline\u2019s Damon Wise called the film \u201cfantastic fun, an endlessly surprising ensemble piece that\u2019s best approached cold.\u201d He had special praise for Lee, calling him \u201ca surprise slapstick master whose presence is an anarchic fusion of Mads Mikkelsen and Buster Keaton.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPark won Best Director at Cannes in 2022 for Decision to Leave. Recently, he made headlines for being expelled from the Writers Guild of America for allegedly violating strike rules. He and writing partner Don McKellar have pushed back<\/a> on the union\u2019s characterization of their actions on The Sympathizer in 2023, and as of early August were not appealing the decision.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat issue was not addressed earlier in the day at a jam-packed Venice press conference, where Park fielded questions about the very long gestation of No Other Choice, while his actors discussed working with the master filmmaker.<\/p>\n

\n\tNo Other Choice will open the Busan International Film Festival on September 17. Mubi has international distribution, with Neon handling North America. It will be released in Korea on September 24 and is playing the New York Film Festival next month.<\/p>\n

\n\tNo Other Choice\u00a0is produced by Park and Back Jisun of Moho Film and Mich\u00e8le Ray Gavras and Alexandre Gavras of KG Productions, and executive produced by Miky Lee of CJ Group. CJ ENM bankrolled the film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Park Chan-wook\u2019s No Other Choice, which marks the Korean filmmaker\u2019s first time playing in the Venice Film Festival…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":187235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[171,6443,104792,80008,104864,67,132,68,9176,104865],"class_list":{"0":"post-187234","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-lee-byung-hun","10":"tag-no-other-choice","11":"tag-park-chan-wook","12":"tag-son-yejin","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us","16":"tag-venice","17":"tag-venice-film-fesival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115117594096033168","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}