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I’m Richard Brody.
I’m a film critic at The New Yorker,
and these are the best movies of 2023.
[upbeat music]
[upbeat jazz music]
The third best movie of the year is Barbie,
one of the most extravagant and comprehensive
cinematic fantasies I’ve seen in a very long time.
♪ Dance the night away ♪
♪ I’ll still keep the party runnin ♪
♪ Not one hair out of place ♪
One of the things I think about when I watch a movie is
where does the filmmaker stand in relation to the material?
And in this particular case, Barbie,
brilliantly and amazingly, is a fantasy about fantasy.
The very subject of the movie is,
what is it for a girl or a woman, for a person,
to play rough, to play freely,
to use imagination so drastically
that it transforms the original object
into something different from what it originally was.
So in effect, the Barbie movie is a movie
about intellectual property.
It’s a movie about how a filmmaker should deal
with intellectual property.
It’s not just about Barbie,
it’s about how to make a film based on Shakespeare
or Jane Austen.
And for all the boring films
of classic literary adaptations one has seen,
this movie is not exactly an antidote,
but it’s a prescription for the free play of imagination.
[Greta Gerwig laughs]
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The second best movie of the year is Asteroid City,
the latest feature by Wes Anderson,
that is a similarly comprehensive fantasy.
This one rooted sort of in history.
The story of Asteroid City, set in the mid 1950s,
is also centered on America’s Red Scare,
anti-communist paranoia.
And one of the things it dramatizes
is the government’s efforts to suppress information
and the spirit of revolt that thrives
among its young scientists.
I’ll fight it all the way to the Supreme Court
if necessary and win.
This just in from the President.
He’s furious.
Thanks a lot, Ricky.
At the same time, it’s a movie about grief and loss.
It’s a film about parents and children,
and it’s tinged with a powerful romanticism
that’s one of the hallmarks of Anderson’s career.
People think of Anderson as a confectionary director,
as a mere stylist,
and indeed he has an exquisite sense of style.
But for me, his style is akin to that of Ernest Hemingway.
Where Hemingway was a minimalist,
Anderson is a Maximalist,
but they have the similar idea
of using their elaborate sense of style
to conjure quietly, but profoundly, a world of romance,
of courage, of danger, of moral responsibility.
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The best movie of the year is Killers of the Flower Moon,
Directed by Martin Scorsese,
and based on a book by David Grann,
a staff writer for the New Yorker.
The movie is based on the true story of the murder
of members of the Osage Nation by white interlopers
who were trying to lay their hands on the wealth
of the Osage Nation, which resulted from the discovery
of oil on tribal lands.
One of the ruses by which that was accomplished
was that white people married into Osage families
and then did away with their spouses.
And that’s the basis of the story here.
When these women die,
with how Osage suffer from illness,
you have to make it the head rights come to you.
You see?
It’s the story of the marriage of a white man
played by Leonardo DiCaprio
and an Osage woman played by Lily Gladstone,
one of the great performances of the year.
[Mollie speaking foreign language]
That’s how you are.
I don’t know what you said,
but it must have been Indian for handsome devil. [chuckles]
[both laughing]
It’s one of the strangest, most mysterious
and most moving stories of a marriage that I’ve ever seen.
It’s akin to Stanley Kubrick’s
Eyes Wide Shut in that regard.
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And I’m not gonna spoil it,
but like the Wizard of Oz, Scorsese in effect,
comes out from behind the curtain
and implicates himself, let’s say morally even politically,
in what it means for him to try to tell this story.
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For its furious traumatization
of a horrific, and still unaddressed historical crime,
for its depiction of the terrifying, even self-destructive,
passion of sexual love,
and for the filmmaker’s own self-questioning
regarding the responsibility of his art,
Killers of the Flower Moon is the best film of 2023.
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