Richard Brody
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
As opposed to a shoemaker's firm?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
As opposed to the shy, retiring and modest Christopher Nolan.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
I'm well aware of it. I think that Megalopolis has been reviewed for its publicity rather than for what's actually on screen. That the story of Francis Ford Coppola spending $120 million of his own money and, above all, the greatest Hollywood sin of all, not caring whether he gets it back, has cost that film significantly in reputation.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
Dune Part 2 shocked me because I think it's a terrible movie. I think it's a sludgy movie. Dune Part 1 at least had an impressive sandworm. This one is an extreme close-up of a vacuum cleaner hose.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
The winner is Adam Driver for Megalopolis. Adam Driver is the actor of his generation. He's almost like John Wayne or Cary Grant. He is... inevitably, always himself. And that, to me, is an enormous virtue, especially in a movie like Megalopolis, where he's playing such an extravagantly composite character, essentially a Leonardo da Vinci of urbanism.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
And yet, he brings a real physicality, a real command to this role, and takes this $120 million and essentially puts it on his back with the sheer force of his personality.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
Okay. Essentially, in this category, it's the brutalist versus the cutilist. I think the cutilist is going to win.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
It goes to Maria de Zia for Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, a film that relatively few people have seen and almost everyone who's seen loves it.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
I think Demi Moore is a wonderful actress. And I think part of the problem in the acting categories is that pretty much everybody is a wonderful actor or actress. The technical level of acting now is extremely high, that they simply have a level of training that makes them virtuosi. And I think that Demi Moore is in a special category. I think she is a
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
essentially sort of like the Joan Crawford of her generation. She really excels in melodrama. I've felt that way ever since seeing her in St. Elmo's Fire in the 1980s. The problem is she came of professional age in an era that made very few melodramas, and so the best years of her life, of her professional life, were spent in something like a wilderness.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
I think it's a correct assessment of the industry's complete misuse of her talent over the last 30 years. The Substance is not a popcorn movie, but I don't think it's a movie that really shows the range of her art.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
Zia Anger for My First Film, Francis Ford Coppola for Megalopolis, Rommel Ross for Nickel Boys, Paul Schrader for O Canada, and Tyler Taormina for Christmas Eve in Miller's Point. And the Brody goes to? Goes to Rommel Ross for Nickel Boys.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
What happened? What makes it innovative also makes it seem to some viewers, even in the industry, somewhat unorthodox, somewhat inherently unpopular by design. What's distinctive about what he does in Nickel Boys is that all the dramatic sequences are filmed from the point of view of one of its main characters. Has that been done before? Oh, it's been done many times before.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
In Hollywood, in a movie called Lady in the Lake, directed by Robert Montgomery in the mid-1940s. I think that's the premise of the Blair Witch Project, if I'm not mistaken. But those films treat it like a gimmick. For Nickel Boys, it has a philosophical dimension. And I don't use that word loosely. Rommel Ross is something of a cinematic philosopher.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
We've seen many, many movies in which horrific inflictions beset the protagonists, in which the main characters suffer terrible fates at the hands of brutal overseers. The difference in Nickel Boys is that the way that the technique is deployed by Ross and the cinematographer, Joe Mofray, you actually feel as if you are in the minds and in the bodies of the characters. I agree.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
It's essentially history being created from within.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
Yeah, I mean, I found Anora fairly superficially entertaining, but indeed superficially entertaining. That's what people say of me all the time. It's a relatively incurious film. In other words, it's a film about a sex worker that has very little to say about her life as a sex worker.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
It's a film about a descendant of a Russian immigrant family that has nothing to say about her life as a Russian immigrant. In other words, I don't think it's a bad setup for a movie. I think that it's done for entertainment value rather than for actual curiosity about the conflicts faced by its protagonist. Can I say something about The Brutalist?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
I'm actually somewhat shocked by the enthusiasm for the brutalist. And I get the impression that Brady Corbet is far more interested in Laszlo as a heroin addict, Ersebet as a sufferer of osteoporosis, and Shofia as someone who can't or won't speak, than actually about their experiences in the Holocaust. It's Holocaust as metaphor.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
unsurprisingly, to Nickel Boys. Nickel Boys was really head and shoulders above the competition. It's a film that I think will, you know, mark the year in history. Alex, you agree?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards
The wicked might win? Wicked might win. I think there's a huge desire for cinematic... Well, I'm holding space for that. Cinematic comfort food that makes a billion dollars.