This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of the deliciously perverse Korean comedy No Other Choice, by Park Chan-wook, director of The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave and the delightfil concert film You Got Gold.
The annual Noir City festival begins tonight at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater. I’ll be covering it in person next weekend. Here’s my Noir City Preview.
ICYMI here’s my year-end coverage:
- Best Movies of 2025
- Best movie-going experiences of 2025
- 2025 Farewells: on the screen
- 2025 Farewells: behind the camera
- 2025: 14 new filmmakers to watch
NOTE: One Battle After Another is now free for HBO Max subscribers.
CURRENT MOVIES
- No Other Choice: keeping up with the Parks. In theaters
- Hamnet: a grieving couple finally aligned. In theaters.I
- It Was Just an Accident: trauma, justice and complications. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- My Dead Friend Zoe: getting to resilience. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- Train Dreams: quietly thinking and quietly feeling. Netflix.Left-Handed Girl: a family’s path to to catharsis. Netflix.
- Marty Supreme: a portrait of chutzpah. In theaters.Sentimental Value: generational healing. In theaters.
- Jay Kelly: finding that the ship has sailed. Netflix.
- My Neighbor Adolf. more than a match of wits. In theaters.
- Cover Up: muckraking back in the day. Netflix
- You Got Gold: why John Prine is admired and beloved. In theaters, but hard to find.
ON TV
On January 21, Turner Classic Movies presents 1977 neo-noir The American Friend, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game. Director Wim Wenders and cinematographer Robby Muller
Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz) is a craftsman who makes frames for paintings and dabbles in the shady world of art fraud, making antique-appearing frames for art forgeries. Here, Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper, in his Wild Man phase)) entangles him in something far more consequential – a murder-for-hire. As befits a neo-noir, Zimmermann finds himself amid a pack of underworld figures, all set to double-cross each other with lethal finality. In very sly casting by Wenders, all the criminals are played by movie directors: Sam Fuller, Nick Ray, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, Gérard Blain, Rudolf Schündler, Jean Eustache. As the murder scheme unfolds, there is a tense and thrilling set piece on a train, worthy of The Narrow Margin. Other set pieces include a white-knuckle break-in and the ambush of an ambulance.
For sure, The American Friend has the only movie Tom Ridley in a cowboy hat, and I’ve heard Highsmith experts trash Hopper’s Tom Ripley. But I think the casting pays off in a brilliant scene in which Hopper lies on a pool table, snapping selfies with a Polaroid camera; it’s a brilliant imagining of a sociopath in solitary, with no one to manipulate.
