No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook, 2025). Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is a longterm employee of a paper company whose comfortable life is disrupted after he’s laid off. After his initial confidence in finding another job quickly proves misguided, Man-su grows desperate. He sniffs out his rivals for a executive position and sets up a hit list, figuring fewer candidates increases his odds of drawing a paycheck again. Director Park Chan-wook’s visual sense is as striking as ever in this film, and the pulpy quality of his story allows for especially playful shots. Stylish and devilishly cynical, No Other Choice is reminiscent of the work of Alfred Hitchcock when he let satirical absurdity encroach. Strong as the film is, its tone and narrative coherence both have their occasional wobbles. Park seems to get so caught up in the dynamics of the film’s look that he evidently loses interest in some of the basics.

The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951). Less famous than the tremendous remake by director John Carpenter, The Thing from Another World is a strong film in its own right. Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) is a military airplane pilot who’s dispatched to the remote base at the North Pole to help the scientists there investigate a strange craft they’ve found. They determine it’s a crashed flying saucer and find a strange body embedded in the ice. After they bring the frozen creature back to the base for further study, circumstances take a turn for the worse. There’s fantastic writing throughout this film. Charles Lederer is the credited screenwriter, and Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht made uncredited polishes. All that talent adds up to snappy dialogue, especially in the banter among the military men as they move from protocol to resourcefulness while navigating their outlandish situation. Christian Nyby is a smooth storyteller, cruising across scenes that could be hokey and enlivening the whole endeavor with a pleasing lack of shame about the B-movie elements.

Are We Good? (Steven Feinartz, 2025). The significant challenge of this documentary is splitting the focus between Marc Maron’s comedy career, his forays in acting and other parts of showbiz, and his preeminence as a podcast trailblazer. That’s before trying to figure out how to introduce the overwhelming grief that came from the shocking death of his partner Lynn Shelton. Steven Feinartz doesn’t quite pull if off — and he’s particularly flummoxed by how to handle a podcast that was defiantly kept off camera — but he assembles just enough of the puzzle pieces to make a worthy picture. In particular, Feinartz shows a keen sense of why Maron is a compelling figure in the first place. Maron’s complexity is on full display in Are We Good? The difficult aspects of the man are present in the film right alongside his strengths.