Our Fault review – ultra-glossy Spanish step-sibling melodrama is too bland to be annoying

Third film adapted from the romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish, feels clunky and cliched This is the third film in a series, after My Fault in 2023 and Your Fault in 2024 , that have been adapted from the Culpable trilogy, romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish. It’s obviously aimed at a specific market that expects a certain blend of melodrama, softcore sex and lush lifestyle porn, and (more importantly) is invested already in the trilogy’s story. Given those parameters, it probably delivers – although the dialogue, at least judging by the subtitles, is super clunky and cliched. Complete outsiders coming to this cold may be a little baffled by what’s going on, since this concluding instalment makes no effort to fill in any blanks. But even total newbies will get the gist that heroine Noah (Nicole Wallace) still has feelings for her ex Nick (Gabriel Guevara) – who also, somewhat disturbingly, was once her stepbrother, although their ...

No Other Choice review – sensational state-of-the-nation satire from Park Chan-wook

Venice film festival
An unemployed paper worker hatches a cunning plan to murder his way back into the job market in this continually surprising black comedy from the director of The Handmaiden and Oldboy

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions. It starts out like an Ealing comedy-type caper then somehow morphs into something else: a portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the breadwinner crisis, and the state of the nation itself. It is based on Donald E Westlake’s satirical horror-thriller The Ax from 1997, previously filmed in 2005 by Costa-Gavras, to whom this film is dedicated. It may not be Park’s masterpiece but it is the best film in the Venice competition so far.

The scene is a perfect family home, where the man of the house, You Man-su (played by Korean star Lee Byung-hun), is benignly presiding over a late-summer barbecue in the garden, grilling some eels that have been given to him by the new American owners of the paper factory where he is employed. Adoringly looking on are his wife Miri (Son Ye-jin), her teen son from a previous marriage, their daughter (a cello prodigy), and their two lovely Labradors. But those eels are in fact a heartless and misjudged part of a job payoff; the new US masters are driving through brutal redundancies and Man-su is among them. He is devastated, but without the emotional language to express or understand how profound this loss is to him. He is fanatically desperate to reclaim his manhood in the eyes of his wife, children and pets by getting a new job in the paper industry within the three months before his severance pay runs out.

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