Richard Brody’s Best Movies of 2023
The film critic discusses the best three films of 2023.
Transcript
00:00 I'm Richard Brody, I'm a film critic at The New Yorker,
00:02 and these are the best movies of 2023.
00:05 The third best movie of the year is "Barbie,"
00:12 one of the most extravagant
00:14 and comprehensive cinematic fantasies
00:16 I've seen in a very long time.
00:18 One of the things I think about when I watch a movie
00:27 is where does the filmmaker stand
00:29 in relation to the material?
00:30 And in this particular case,
00:32 "Barbie," brilliantly and amazingly,
00:34 is a fantasy about fantasy.
00:37 The very subject of the movie is
00:39 what is it for a girl or a woman,
00:42 for a person, to play rough, to play freely,
00:47 to use imagination so drastically
00:50 that it transforms the original object
00:53 into something different from what it originally was.
00:56 So in effect, "The Barbie Movie"
00:58 is a movie about intellectual property.
01:00 It's a movie about how a filmmaker
01:02 should deal with intellectual property.
01:03 It's not just about Barbie,
01:04 it's about how to make a film
01:06 based on Shakespeare or Jane Austen.
01:08 And for all the boring films
01:11 of classic literary adaptations one has seen,
01:14 this movie is not exactly an antidote,
01:16 but it's a prescription for the free play of imagination.
01:19 The second best movie of the year is "Asteroid City,"
01:25 the latest feature by Wes Anderson
01:27 that is a similarly comprehensive fantasy,
01:31 this one rooted sort of in history.
01:34 The story of "Asteroid City," set in the mid-1950s,
01:38 is also centered on America's red scare,
01:41 anti-communist paranoia.
01:43 And one of the things it dramatizes
01:45 is the government's efforts to suppress information
01:48 and the spirit of revolt
01:49 that thrives among its young scientists.
01:52 - I'll fight it all the way to the Supreme Court
01:54 if necessary, and win.
01:56 - This just in from the president.
01:58 - He's furious.
02:01 Thanks a lot, Ricky.
02:02 - At the same time, it's a movie about grief and loss.
02:05 It's a film about parents and children,
02:08 and it's tinged with a powerful romanticism
02:11 that's one of the hallmarks of Anderson's career.
02:14 People think of Anderson as a confectionary director,
02:16 as a mere stylist,
02:18 and indeed he has an exquisite sense of style.
02:20 But for me, his style is akin to that of Ernest Hemingway,
02:24 where Hemingway was a minimalist
02:26 and Anderson is a maximalist,
02:28 but they have the similar idea
02:30 of using their elaborate sense of style
02:33 to conjure quietly but profoundly
02:36 a world of romance, of courage, of danger,
02:40 of moral responsibility.
02:42 The best movie of the year is "Killers of the Flower Moon,"
02:49 directed by Martin Scorsese
02:50 and based on a book by David Graham,
02:53 a staff writer for "The New Yorker."
02:54 The movie is based on the true story
02:56 of the murder of members of the Osage Nation
02:59 by white interlopers who were trying to lay their hands
03:04 on the wealth of the Osage Nation,
03:07 which resulted from the discovery of oil on tribal lands.
03:11 One of the ruses by which that was accomplished
03:13 was that white people married into Osage families
03:16 and then did away with their spouses.
03:19 And that's the basis of the story here.
03:21 - When these women died,
03:22 with how Osage suffered from the illness,
03:24 you have to make it the head rats come to you.
03:27 You see?
03:29 - It's the story of the marriage of a white man,
03:34 played by Leonardo DiCaprio,
03:36 and an Osage woman, played by Lily Gladstone,
03:38 one of the great performances of the year.
03:40 - Show me Cassie.
03:41 That's how you are.
03:43 - I don't know what she said,
03:45 but it must've been Indian for handsome devil.
03:48 - Hey, shit. (laughs)
03:51 - It's one of the strangest, most mysterious,
03:54 and most moving stories of a marriage that I've ever seen.
03:57 It's akin to Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut"
03:59 in that regard.
04:00 And I'm not gonna spoil it,
04:02 but like "The Wizard of Oz,"
04:04 Scorsese, in effect, comes out from behind the curtain
04:07 and implicates himself, let's say, morally,
04:11 even politically, in what it means
04:13 for him to try to tell this story.
04:15 For its furious dramatization
04:18 of a horrific and still unredressed historical crime,
04:23 for its depiction of the terrifying,
04:25 even self-destructive passion of sexual love,
04:29 and for the filmmaker's own self-question
04:32 regarding the responsibility of his art,
04:35 "Killers of the Flower Moon" is the best film of 2023.
04:39 (upbeat music)
04:41 [BLANK_AUDIO]