The Press Box - The New Yorker’s Richard Brody on the State of Movies Today

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Today on The Press Box, Bryan sits down with New Yorker film critic Richard Brody. The duo discuss Brody’s career reviewing movies, being a filmmaker in the early ’90s (while also working at a detective agency), and how exactly he shifted careers and got hired at The New Yorker. The guys also talk through the main complaints consumers have about movies these days and how warranted they are. To close things out, Brody gives his “Five Politically Relevant Summer Movies.” Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Richard Brody Producer: Ben Cruz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.cair. Every style, every home. Hello media consumers. Welcome to Press Box. And welcome to New York Month. We've already had our first guest here in Spotify's New York Studios, Frank Miller,

the creator of Sin City and the Dark Night Returns. He was here yesterday. You'll hear that interview very soon. But today I wanted to interview a writer whose work I always find fascinating, Richard Brody. Richard Brody is a movie critic who started writing for The New Yorker in 1999. He was also a filmmaker. And back in 1993, the New York Times wrote about him when he was trying to finish an independent movie

while also working at a detective agency. I discovered Brody's writing a decade later. The New Yorker was in the process of transforming from a physical magazine with a couple of critics, Anthony Lane and David Denby, into a website. And here on the New Yorker's casual internet lounge was Brody, writing passionately about movies, telling you about movies you'd never heard of, making arguments. I remember one time Brody said that his favorite Steven Spielberg movie was 1941. At the magazine that had been so upright, Brody was what you could call a poster,

someone who was eager to write about movies as James Harden is to take a three-pointer. Where does that passion come from? Here's Richard Brody. Richard, thanks for coming to our New York studio. Brian, it's the pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. When did you first think about becoming a movie critic? Much earlier and much later than one should.

I was not a movies person in high school. I didn't fall in love with the art of movies until I was a freshman in college in 1975. And what made me a movie person was a viewing of Jean-Luc Godard's film, Breathless. It was a molecular transformation. I came out of that film converted to the cinema, and I knew that everything I did in life would have to do with movies. The first thing I also knew was that I wanted to know more about this person, Jean-Luc Godard, whoever that was. I didn't even know what a director was, really. For me, movies were a Saturday

night entertainment, nothing more, until that point. So when I was on my way home to my parents' house on Long Island for Thanksgiving. I stopped at a bookstore on 57th Street, the Coliseum, which no longer exists, unfortunately, and found a book called Godard on Godaach, figuring he'd be talking about himself. It turns out to be a book of his film criticism. Very strange. I knew that there was such a thing as a film critic. I read reviews every now and then, but it was a big surprise to me to discover that the person who I considered, you know, the greatest or just say the only filmmaker I knew anything about, had been or even was a film critic. Needless to say, I learned a great deal about film from what he wrote.

But I also learned conceptually that one of the things that made his films so interesting is precisely the fact that as a critic he thought like a filmmaker, and as a filmmaker, he thought like a critic. So I pretty quickly realized that I was going to be able to write film criticism long before I was going to be able to write movies, and that's what I started to do in college. After your conversion, I mentioned you want to see a lot of old movies. Yes, old and new. How did you go about doing that in the 70s? Well, first of all, in college there was a film society.

Students projected, selected, and projected films on 16mm for other students. So that was the nearest at-hand method. But then whenever I was home on vacation or even over the summer, I would go to the repertory theaters of New York, places like the Bleaker Street Cinema, the Carnegie Hall Cinema, Theater, 80, St. Mark's Place, mostly places that no longer exist. for their habitual double features of classic movies, international and American films.

It's interesting, right? Because if an 18-year-old now got interested in movies and they wanted to see everything that, let's say, Howard Hawks ever made, they would efficiently download the films of Howard Hawks onto their phone or onto their television and watch them in order. What you're talking about is a more scattershot, more piecemeal method of what's playing in a rep house at the time or what they're showing at the school, Do you think that method of seeing old movies affected your film education?

It affected it tremendously because one was dependent on what was available. On the other hand, a great deal was available. There's no right way. There's no right way in the door. But I do think that one of the reasons why film criticism is in such an excellent state today is precisely this extraordinarily wide-ranging and rapid availability of movies. There are simply many more movies of all sorts that are available to a young film person today.

And therefore, young critics have a far wider range of knowledge and a far wider range of curiosity because you can't even be curious about what you have no idea exists. After college, you worked on TV commercials? I worked on TV commercials. What did you learn from that again? experience? To stop doing it. I enjoyed it tremendously.

That's why I stopped. I enjoyed it so much that on a daily basis, my activities were really so much fun, so interesting. But I actually didn't want to end up having done nothing but TV commercials in my life. Therefore, as I was enjoying it, I walked out the door. And you also wanted to direct movies yourself? I did. What kind of director did you want to be?

That's a very good question. I just wanted to make movies that felt like the movies. movies I wanted to see that didn't exist yet. And what I quickly discovered was I was incapable of doing that. And I discovered it in a way that didn't even involve seeing my own work. I had the good fortune at a certain point that somebody I knew both had much more money than I did and wanted to have some involvement in the film business. And so he put up a small sum of money for a small independent film with a crew of five and the actors I could get, some of whom happened to have been really excellent.

And what I realized very quickly was stepping onto a set, even if that set was my own apartment, I was confronted by a massive machine, a machine that felt to me as massive as if I had been stepping onto a Hollywood set. What I realized immediately is movies aren't a matter of telling the story you want to tell, showing the actors you want to show, creating the images you want to create. direction is to a large extent production, having an experience, creating an experience with other people. You know, Martin Scorsese has this line that movies are a matter of what's inside the frame and what's outside the frame. And what I came to realize is what that meant is it's a matter of both, which is to say it's a matter of everything.

And I was not very good at creating and everything. I was not good at organizing and managing an environment. Production produced me. I didn't manage the set. And so before seeing the first image I had made, I knew that a disaster was on its way. The movie we're talking about was called Liability Crisis? Yes.

And the New York Times profiled you while you were making that. And the paper said you were also working at a detective agency. Yeah, I was attempt at a detective agency for a little while. To make some money. To make some money, yeah. What was the whole experience of putting that movie together like besides? Like you said, the overwhelming nature of the wrangling. That's what it was like.

It was traumatic. I was doing something that I realized pretty quickly I wasn't apt for and then realized that I also had to kind of sell it and see it to the end. It was not a very happy time to realize that I was not very good at something I wanted to do. On the other hand, I got some valuable experience. To your earlier point, a lesson of a lifetime. To your earlier point about Godard, Are the jobs of filmmaker and film critic related?

Yes and no, which is to say, I think that a film critic who presumes to be creative in the way that a film director is creative is going too far, is being somewhat arrogant. On the other hand, the connection between the filmmaker and the film critic is that, to my way of thinking, if the film critic is doing the job right,

the critic is entering into a kind of imaginative sympathy with filmmakers. And even more, devoting themselves, not so much to evaluating as in a taste test or a consumer guide, a movie at hand, but thinking of the art of movies as such, which is why, I mean, criticism is in a way fundamentally parasitic.

There could be movies without critics, but there can't be critics without movies. On the other hand, I don't think of criticism as literature, and I don't think of it as creative art, but I think of it as prophecy. I think of the subject of film criticism as the future of the art of cinema.

And that's the relationship of the filmmaker and the film critic. The film critic is seeing the future of the art as it is or is not latent in the movie at hand. How'd you get hired by the New Yorker? I was very fortunate. David Remnick and I have known each other since college. We actually were among the founders of a college newspaper, a weekly called the Nassau Weekly,

that was modeled on the village voice, which is to say a combination of investigative journalism and arts criticism. And he was the culture editor. I was the film editor. Ever since then, since 1979, we've been talking about movies all the time. And, you know, you'll have to ask him why he brought me in. But my interpretation is we've been talking about movies for a very long time,

and he wanted to share that conversation with readers. I will say that there's a funny connection between my involvement with the New Yorker and Pauline Kale's involvement with the New Yorker. When Pauline Kell was hired by William Sean in 1967, supposedly one of the reasons why she was hired was that she had been, as he put it, writing very lovingly about the films of Jean-Luc Godot. David certainly knew of my interest in the films of Goddard, and one of the first things I did at the New Yorker was a profile of Godaard at a moment when his career did not exist in the United States. He had not had a film released in a very long time, and many of the

of the people I spoke to about him here thought he was actually dead. They were surprised to learn that he was still alive. And after the piece came out, I was asked to write a book about Godard. Everything is cinema. It's a critical biography. And when my editor, when at Metropolitan Books ask me, have you ever thought of writing a book about Godaar? My answer was, you know, for 25 years, but you have to ask me. And then when the manuscript was just about done, by pure coincidence, the person who was the movie's editor of the going on about town section of the New Yorker was leaving, and that's when I started full-time.

Goddard has had an amazing effect on your life because he inspired you to be a critic. You wrote a book about him. And then I also read that when you met your wife in Paris and a chance encounter, one of your first questions was, do you like the films of Godar? That's correct. And she said she didn't, and I said to myself, this is going to be very interesting. And it's still interesting. I learn every day.

When I first started reading you in the New Yorker, David Denby and Anthony Lane were writing reviews in the magazine. And then I would read a piece of yours online. And reading it, it often, to me, had a little bit of a different voice. It almost felt like blogging. Did you think of it that way? It started as blogging. In fact, to this day, the rubric, the front row is called, you know, in quotes a blog, even though there's nothing bloggy about it anymore. But that's indeed what happened. I was writing capsule reviews and DVD notes in the magazine in print. And of course, there was no online components of the New Yorker when I started. And when the New Yorker began to publish original work online, many of the people who were asked to do so were ones who were not writing a great deal in print. And my explicit mandate was to have a movie's blog, which meant three posts a day.

In effect, what I was getting at the age of 50 was the kind of training that most of my contemporaries had been getting in their early 20s, which was learning to be a daily journalist. I got you. And the ideas that you were putting on the blog were different ideas than could have run in the magazine, say? Fair? No, I don't think so.

I think one of the things that I learned writing about Godard, whose films I consider in some ways complex, and that's not a criticism. They're simply really sophisticated works of art, is that there is not an idea that you cannot express in the pages of the New Yorker. It's just a matter of finding the way to express them that makes them clear enough that you're communicating to readers what they are. So, no, I don't think they couldn't have been put in print. they just didn't happen to be at the moment.

Everybody who writes or talks about movies for a living has a different idea of what the job of a critic is. You nodded at this a moment ago, but what do you think the job is? Yeah, the job of the critic is the art itself. It's loving the art in the first place. It's believing in the future of the art. One of the things that irritates me terribly about some critics.

I mean, there was a wonderful art. I mean, Susan Sontag is one of the most brilliant critics who has, you know, ever written. But in the 1990s, she wrote a piece, the subject of which is basically the movies are over. To me, that's a disqualifying sentiment to express if you're going to be writing about film. I happen to think that the world of movies is extremely exciting, that things are being done in movies now that could not have been done in the past. It doesn't mean that all movies are better, of course. That could never be the case.

It doesn't even mean that there's any individual director who may be greater than any one of the greats of the past. It means that there are possibilities being realized in the cinema that were simply impossible in the 1930s or 40s or 50s or 70s. That's one of the reasons why it's very important for film critics who are essentially by professional mandate concentrating on new movies. on new releases, to spend a great deal of time on the past, to not just watch classic movies, but to write about classic movies.

You know, there's this line from the German aphorist, Liechtenberg, the 18th century aphorist, that, you know, speaking of a certain writer, he said, you know, this person is called a genius, the way the insect is called a millipede, not because it has a thousand legs, but because nobody's bothered to count them. And I think that it's very important for critics

to count the classics, to look at the classics, both to appreciate them fully and see what it is that they do and are, but also to subject them to evaluation the same way that you evaluate contemporary works. What's something the movies are doing now that the movies could not have done in the 30s and 40s? There's a freedom in narrative that simply didn't exist, and the relationship between script and image and the story that's being told. The films of Wes Anderson are unlike any that have ever existed in the history of cinema. Barbie is unlike a film that has ever existed in the history of cinema.

Nickel Boys is unlike anything that could ever have been realized in the past. And that's just off the top of my head. Every year, there are extraordinary. There was a movie that watches popped into mind. A movie called My First Film by an independent filmmaker named Zia Anger, whose film was about a film that she made. made in the early 2010s

and a live performance that she had done about the making of that movie. This would have been impossible any time in the past. Even with a metafictional film like and there were great ones from the 60s Symbiocycotachotaxoplasm take one,

David Holtzman's Diaries, there are brilliant metaphictional films from classic cinema, classic modernist cinema. But what Zia Anger did in that film could not have been done in the past. with the movies in an uncertain place financially. Do you think it's part of your job to argue on behalf of the medium itself, to convince people to go to the movies?

Somebody, after I'd written a negative review of a film, somebody asked me, are you suggesting that I not see this film? And my answer is, no, I'm suggesting that you not enjoy it. I like that. Basically, whatever is worth writing about is worth seeing. The very fact that I'm spending my time and my life devoted to what's happening in movies right now should be advocacy itself. But I don't think it does the art or the business of movies any good

to advocate for particular films that are necessarily especially good. It's important to try to see where this art form can go and to see what, in fact, where it's falling short. That's how you cultivate love of film, because that's what ultimately critics, whether they realize it or not, are doing. They're sharing love. Anybody who comes to criticism

wanting to be the hammer, wanting to demolish is in the wrong field. And it comes out very quickly and they're not taken very seriously. The whole reason for doing this is because, I love movies like I love nothing else. You once said this, the moral essence of criticism is the world of movies is bigger and better than the world of movies as it is presented to you at your local multiplex.

So given the decline of theater going and the rise of streaming, has that argument gotten easier to make? That argument has always been easy to make. It's neither easier nor harder. You know, it's funny because a couple of the movies I mentioned as, you know, among the best of recent times are multiplex movies. I don't think there's a difference in kind between, you know, movies that play in art houses and movies that play in big theaters. The individual work of art has its own merits regardless of the budget, regardless of the venue. I think that the middle has somewhat been hollowed out.

I think it's certainly true that there are few. fewer, let's say, multiplex movies than there used to be. But I'm not sure, but I'm not nostalgic for the era of the mid-range drama. I think that that nostalgia is more nostalgia for prominence and for budget level than for the films themselves. In other words, one of the things that has happened now is the radicalization of cinema at both. ends. You know, on the one hand, you know, Barbie is a multiplex film that did extremely well. It's stranger than anything that could have been done in the past. On the other hand, there were brazenly mercenary

films being put out by the studios that, you know, essentially where their brazenness as a mark of honor in a certain way, they're simply commercial products and they're being turned out like, you know, fast food. And people, and not saying it's a bad thing, but there have always been commercial movies, but now there's no shame in being as commercial as need be. What happened with the mid-range films is that filmmakers of vast artistic ambition

would go hat in hand to studios with their extremely interesting ideas and saying, but don't worry, I'll make it commercial. And whether they wanted to or not, they were basically forced to. One of the things that was revealing to me in the, I don't do a tremendous number of interviews. I find that many, many interviews that people in the film world do

that are connected to the release of a new film are sadly self-promotional. You know, essentially, let me tell you how good my work is. There are a few people who get away from that, but I think that the proliferation of interviews is part of the promotional machinery rather than the informative machinery of criticism. On the other hand,

I had the privilege of interviewing Martin Scorsese when the Killers of the Flower Moon was coming out. And I had had the impression that when he won his Oscar for the Departed, it was a great liberation for him. I always loved many of his films, but not all of his films. And I always kind of had the feeling

that there was a compromise going on in his work, again, not with every film, but with many films between what studios wanted or needed from him and what he wanted to do. And that when he won the Oscar for the Departed, It essentially canonized the name of Martin Scorsese. It essentially made the name more valuable than the films themselves and therefore gave him the freedom, the financial freedom,

to do the kind of work that he had been aching to do for a very long time. And what he told me that really startled me was that at the time he made the departant, he was actually thinking of leaving the movie business. He intended not to make another movie because he was so frustrated by what it meant to make a movie in a studio, by the resistance that he was getting from studios for the work he wanted to do.

And I think that that was pretty endemic to the so-called mid-range movies of the 1990s that people get very nostalgic about. I think that the world of movies is far wilder and far more interesting in the last 20 years because the studios got out of the mid-range drama game and because those films were being essentially done

but at a much lower budget level by independent producers who were happy to let filmmakers pursue their ideas to their wildest extremes. After watching a movie, how quickly do you like to get back to your computer to write? Only as quickly as necessary. You know, sometimes it means rushing home and writing overnight, and I don't mind that at all.

I think that there's, you know, sincerity and spontaneity. You know, this is where circumstances dictate. You know, that's what deadlines are great for. You're as fast as... as you have time to be faster, as slow as you have time to be slow. Exactly. An important question for every movie critic, how do you take notes in the dark? Very fast.

The answer is I do it all the time. I sometimes fill an entire notebook with notes, and then, very often, before I start to write a review, I transcribe those notes by typing the mouth, because if I don't do so very quickly, I will not be able to read my notes. Is it true that the New Yorker sends a fact-checker to the theater to confirm dialogue from the movie

and details from the plot? Yes, and I'm very grateful for that. They've saved you from bad mistakes. Absolutely. Do you remember one of them? I think I've repressed them. Trauma, they're traumatic. Fair enough.

You mentioned Pauline Kale earlier. How do you think Kale's writing is aged? Her writing is brilliant. Her ideas about movies are a real problem, but there are a problem that is really worth confronting. When I started at The New Yorker, I found myself kind of immersed in Kale World. She had retired in the early 1990s. I had the privilege of speaking with her once by phone for three hours, and it was a wonderful conversation.

I found her extremely generous, extremely forthcoming. I was very sorry not to have met her. I'll be honest about it. She had invited me to visit her in Great Barrington. She told me I needed a car to get there. I don't have a license. and then she died before I was able to

essentially figure out how in the world to get up there and I really regretted that and I regret it to this day. You know, we ran capsule reviews from the history of the magazine and so I spent a great deal of time

reading Pauline Kale's capsule reviews as well as her full-length reviews and I mean, I should admit this. In the 1970s, when I started getting interested in movies, the one critic whose name was known was Pauline Kale. So I started reading Pauline Kale. Colleen Kale, and I almost threw the New Yorker across the room.

I found something so inimical to my sensibility in her criticism. And that was a kind of argument from authority, the sense that having seen classic movies in their day, she knew firsthand what a movie classic was and knew what had been done and had not been done, and therefore whippersnapper, you really don't have any idea about what's going on. In her case, this was a movie from the 30s or 40s most often. Yeah, exactly.

You know, I found her condescending to younger readers. I was a younger reader. And I found that there was a lack of connection to a contemporary sensibility, whatever that meant, because I was no hipster. I was not, you know, hanging out in the East Village. listening to punk rock. I liked it, by the way, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it. I listened to a lot of jazz and to classical music. So I'm not an exemplary citizen of my generation necessarily, but I felt that on sheerly the basis of age, she was repudiating a new generation sensibility. I think that she

had, on the one hand, a really keen idea that in order to appreciate and love movies, you needed to distinguish movies from the other art form. There was something distinct about a movie experience. And I think that's exactly right. On the other hand, she set the template for that with a very limited array of movies, namely the movies she grew up with. And there's this line that she wrote sometime in the early 70s. Movies are very good at action and not very good at reflection.

To which my response is, all that means is that Hollywood was screwing up in the 30s and 40s. That tells you what the production system was emphasizing and rendering impossible, because when the movies were freed up, whether in the French New Wave or in the many new waves of the 1960s or independent filmmaking of the 60s and 70s onward, or, for instance, classics by films, if I say, Carl Theodore Dreyer or Robert Brasson, there's plenty of reflection in these movies. It's just that they didn't hit the mainstream. What's the strongest reaction of filmmaker had to one of your articles? Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Um, positive or negative?

No, I, you know, I thought... I think I'm more interested in negative, but you can tell me either way. No, no, no, no. I know. I consider myself fortunate. You know, filmmakers whose work I've written about have, in general, been human in their responses. one of the even when I don't like a film, even when I find a film

artistically heinous in some way, I try not to make it an ad hominem thing. And I think that that's one of the things that distinguishes the present day of film criticism from the film criticism of the 60s, 70s, even 80s. When you read reviews in major publications, including the New York or the New York Times, the New Republic

any publication that was publishing serious critics. They were insulting filmmakers. They were insulting actors. They were insulting the way actors looked. Criticism was considered a

inseparable from invective. It was almost a mark of sincerity to be flinging it the way you would fling it at a cafe table. And one of of the best things that's happened in criticism in recent years is that filmmakers talk back. That because of social media, filmmakers, the critics are criticized. And I think it has made

critics rightly more responsible. It doesn't mean that I don't say what I think, but, you know, one thinks many things. It isn't that one has simply one response to a film, but afterwards, one thinks it out and thinks what is my, you know, my most considered response. What's the one that, like, speaks most deeply to me, not the one that comes to mind instantly, necessarily? You see that as a good thing. I see it as a very good thing. Because you could see it the opposite way that if a director can talk back or a star can advertise the movie on their Instagram page, that makes the critic less powerful.

And that takes away some of the power than in the decades you're talking about the 70s, 80s and 90s. No, criticism is not about power. I'm not looking to have power. I'm looking to express my ideas and my thoughts and my feelings to read. How about influence rather than power? I think that responsibility and influence should go hand in hand. As the world fills up with podcasts and social media videos, do you worry about the future of the written movie review? Most writers like to talk.

But writing begins, we're talking ends in silence. Writing is a very introspective activity. And I think that there will always be readers who want that extended personal relationship to thinking about movies. I think, unfortunately, just in the same way that newspapers, daily newspapers are closing and websites are shutting down,

And I think that there are going to be fewer and fewer outlets. On the other hand, one of the things that has happened in criticism in recent years, and one of the things that has made criticism so good compared to the past, is that people who don't have steady gigs at major publications are able to get their work out one way or another. Criticism has been democratized by the Internet, by social media, and far younger people are making their voices heard and a far wider range of voices are being heard

than used to be. And my feeling about many of these writers who I think are excellent is that, no, maybe the general reader is not reading their work. But the critics whom the general readers are reading are reading their work. There are lots of young and excellent critics whose influence is well-deserved and completely under the radar.

Come back to the idea of the written review for a second, because let's say Disclosure Day comes out. You write a piece about Disclosure Day. Your colleague Justin Chang writes a piece about Disclosure Day. They're both worth reading, but maybe they take 10 minutes each, 10 minutes for you, 10 minutes for him. We could do that, or I could put you and Justin in a studio just like this one and talk about Disclosure Day for, have you talked about Disclosure Day for an hour,

or an hour and a half, however long you. want to go. Would that be necessarily a lesser product than two written reviews? Yes. You think so? Absolutely. Absolutely, because the process of introspection, consideration of looking very closely at a film both in detail and in context is something that doesn't necessarily happen in spontaneous speech. Not that it can't, not that there can't be insights that arise out of the blue when you're talking with somebody. But the writing process

is an inherently inward experience. It's a way of gathering the details of experience and putting them together in a form that is itself

quasi-artistic. It's not performative in the same way. It's an object that exists that admits of editing that requires editing. I mean, I, by the way, happen to think that all of my pieces should be published with credits like a movie. I'm very grateful to the editors, fact checkers, copy editors, everybody I work with.

But, you know, ultimately, when you write, you are looking very deep into your soul in a way that conversation doesn't necessarily achieve. I got a few complaints that you hear people express about the movies today. I wanted to read them to you. and you tell me how they register with you. Complaint number one, too many Hollywood movies are sequels or reboots. They always have been.

They always have been. What Price Hollywood, 1932, was remade as a star is born 1937, was remade as a star is born 1954, was remade as a star as born 1976, and again, recently. The difference is that memory didn't exist. In other words,

the person who saw what Price, Hollywood in 1932 had no way of seeing what Price Hollywood in 1937. Therefore in some weird way, a star is born then was new and a star is born in 1954 was new again except for people who'd been around long enough to see the original one and remember it. In other words, maybe for film critics. The problem with reboots is not the fact that classic material is being reconceived. In fact, that is kind of the definition of art.

Sophocles' Reconceived Homer. and so forth. Now Christopher Nolan is doing so. The problem is the lack of freedom. In other words, I don't mean political freedom, I mean artistic freedom, that because the IP involved in reboots is often so valuable,

studios and producers place enormous constraints on filmmakers. You know, I'm not a huge fan of most of the recent James Bond films. It's not because of James Bond. It's because of the circumstances, the conditions under which the movies are being made. I wish that Martin Scorsese or Sophia Coppola or Spike Lee or Wes Anderson could make a James Bond film and do so with the same freedoms that they bring to the work on scripts of their own.

But the studio is not going to let them do it. The problem is not the idea of the reboot. The problem is the circumstances under which rebuts are being made. What's a sequel or reboot you've liked? Old Boy. Spike Lee's Old Boy is much better than the original. Ooh, that's a good... Because he politicizes it very explicitly. You dealt with middlebrow dramas earlier, so let me give you this.

Complaint number two, more and more sophisticated storytelling and artistry have moved away from movies and towards television. Something has moved away to television. Yes. Television is storytelling by the shovelful, and that's the reason for its success. Relatively few movies are directed with great imagination. most of Hollywood has been the dispensing of movies audiovisually or the way I'll describe it, taking pictures of actors acting. Television does that more or less just as well. Television is a writer's medium. It's not a director's medium because serials are, you know, because essentially the butterfly effect takes control of the script. If somebody changes something

in the pilot or the first season, it's going to have an effect all the way through. the script is essentially a somewhere between a prison and a straitjacket, depending on the director. The reason for the success of serial television, of so-called prestige TV, which very rarely achieves the level of artistry that a good movie does, is that it goes outside the aesthetic of movies, goes outside the purview of the film critic, and into the realm of cultural journalism and journalism in general. For a very simple reason, what is it that journalists

traffic, traffic, and what is it the journalist deal with? What is the stuff of journalism? It's stories. So there are so many stories that are told in such detail in serial TV

that journalists, cultural journalists, eat it up despite its utter lack of aesthetic sophistication. Complaint number three. More and more people aren't watching movies in theaters

as they're meant to be seen but watching them on their phones. That's true, clearly, but I'm not complaining about that. I'm agnostic on the subject. Your platform agnostic. I'm platform agnostic. I love watching movies in theaters. I love watching movies on the computer.

The phone is not ideal, but I've done it, and when I've done it, I've loved it. I was visiting my daughter in college. I had a long bus ride back, and I watched, you know, Norson Wells film on my phone, and I had a great time with it. Something always comes through. It's always a different experience, but the differences are different for every film and in no foreseeable way. I think that the availability of home video

has made it possible for viewers, both casual viewers and critics, to be far more sophisticated about what they're watching. You can simply re-watch things. When I watch a movie at home, I almost never watch it straight through. Almost never. In fact, the more I love it,

the less inclined I am to watch it straight through. I want to stop and watch a passage again. sometimes in slow motion. And I don't feel that it impedes comprehension of the entire work as a unity. The problem with watching

movies any place but a theater is one of business. I think that if home video were as readily monetized, if phone viewing were as readily monetized as theatrical viewing is, there wouldn't necessarily be the same push on the part of filmmakers to watch

films in theaters. And I don't mean that filmmakers don't love theaters. I think we all love the experience of being immersed in a movie. My blog is called The Front Row. I like to sit so far up front that, you know, I have to turn my head to see the image. I don't want to feel like the image is one image, but a collection of images. And if I could, sometimes I'd sit, you know, behind the screen and be in it. That said, there are many ways to watch a movie, but really only one way to make money

on a movie, and in order for the business to survive, in order for careers of filmmakers to survive, theatrical viewing is at the moment essential. So it's the economics as much as the sacredness of the movie house itself? I think so. All right, as you know, we like lists here at the Ringer, and you were kind enough to indulge me and to make a list. And the prompt I gave you was five politically relevant summer movies. And I left it to you to define political relevance and summer movies.

movie as you see fit. So should we go through these one by one? Sure, please. I'm never really sure what a summer movie is, by the way. It's a relatively recent category. I mean, I saw Jaws when it was in first run, and that's widely considered, you know, the first summer movie. Something about the idea, something I do about the, about the idea of unanimity that I find fascistic. As crowded as a theater is, the experience of movie going is deep personal. And if you're having the programmed response that the people sitting next to you are having, there's something

actually kind of horrifying about that. And that's why I'm not entirely sure what a summer movie is or should be. Is it a movie that was released in the summer? Because there's always been a lot of counter programming in the summers of art house films, independent films, international films. Is it a movie that

depicts summer? So I've played along with the idea of summer to the extent that I found movies that are politically relevant. Never mind the fascism. You're playing along with the concept here. Exactly. And the first one that comes to mind is Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing,

which is both released in the summer and a film that is quintessentially of summer. About summer. About summer. And it's painfully politically relevant in many ways, one of which is culture wars. You know, the fundamental point of conflict in that film is cultural recognition and the idea that a community's heroes should or would not be represented in that community. I just read that Harriet Tubman will no longer be printed, her portrait will no longer be appearing on the $20 bill.

You know, I'm pretty pissed off about this. And it reminds me of a key plot line. and do the right thing. All right, that's number one. What's number two? Number two. A movie that came out right before summer, but that is centered on summer,

Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom. It is a misconception that Wes Anderson is merely an esthetic, merely a stylist. Wes Anderson is essentially a political filmmaker. And in Moonrise Kingdom, the subject of his political critique is moralism,

religious moralism, as it's applied in that particular film to young people in love. It's set in 1964-65. It's essentially his film about the cultural revolution of the 60s, the opposition musically, artistically, and romantically, to the traditional moralism that prevailed in public life until then. Mr. Anderson's obviously somebody who has a lot of interest in the New Yorker.

Have you corresponded with him or talked to him over the years? Well, I did a profile of him in 2009 at the time that he was making. and fantastic Mr. Fox. And he is a great example of a filmmaker who thinks like a critic. He's extremely steeped in the history of cinema. He loves the history of cinema, and you both see it reflected in his films and in his activities on behalf of other filmmakers.

For instance, just now there was a restoration and re-release of Satya Jit Reyes' Days and Nights in the Forest, and he recorded an introduction for it. All right, what's number three on your list? Number three on the list is not a summer film, but it is a summer-like film in that it is a mega-super spectacle, one of the most mega, most super spectacles in the history of cinema, and one of the most ferocious pieces of political cinema ever to be made, namely Heaven's Gate, Michael Chimino's Heaven's Gate.

The story of which, essentially, is grandees in the Midwest, assassinating immigrants who they found inconveniently tilling the land, where they wanted to cultivate, where they wanted to be ranchers, where they wanted to raise cattle. It's essentially, you know, from Harvard to murder. It's a story of how, you know, the best and the brightest and how business people, how wealthy interests conspire to target and, as it turns out, kill in the movie an immigrant population in the United States. You think the story of the making of Heaven's Gate has overshadowed what Heaven's Gate actually is? Oh, I do very much so. I think that critics are very much to blame for the assassination of Heaven's Gate.

I think that in some weird way, critics who depend on the business very often take the side of the business against the filmmaker. And this is one case where that happened. All right, Richard, what's number four on your list? Numbers four and five no longer stick to the current template of summer movies. Just the politically relevant side. And there are two movies from the 1950s. One of the things that I think is going on right now

is a pathological nostalgia. I don't mean an artistic nostalgia. I don't mean a, but a political nostalgia for the age of Jim Crow, for the age before feminism. And two movies that come to mind are Ida Lupino's film Outreach. Ida Lupino, of course, is one of the great Hollywood actresses of the 40s and 50s. She also was a director, a great director.

She was essentially an independent filmmaker within Hollywood in the early 1950s. And she made a film in 1950 called Outrage, the subject of which is rape, the subject of which is a young woman who is raped and has great difficulty getting the police involved, investigating, great trouble expressing to her fiancé the kind of trauma she's going through. And unfortunately, in fact, devastatingly, the problems that Ida Lupino depicts with great artistic passion in this movie persist to this day. All right, number five? Number five. Raoul Walsh's film, A Lion is in the Streets from 1953, starring James Cagney.

It's a movie about a demagogue. It's a movie about a salesman who knows exactly which people. buttons to push. And in a southern town, he figures out how to rise from peddler to demagogue. And it's by ostensibly taking the position of poor people against the business establishment when, in fact, he is very much in the pocket of the business establishment, and his main target is actually reformers. That sounds oddly familiar. He takes on, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, The story involves election chicanery. It involves election denial.

It involves a private militia. It's a remarkably contemporary story. That sounds even more familiar. That's fantastic. All right, do the right thing. Moonrise Kingdom, Heaven's Gate, Outrage, and a Lion is in the Streets. Five politically relevant asterisk summer movies. Exactly.

That sounds fantastic. Richard Brody, read him in the New Yorker and on the New Yorker's website. Richard, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Ryan, it's a pleasure talking with you. Thanks for having me. All right, that's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. More New York month to come.

We're going to have lots and lots of cool guests. We're going to be in these studios. I cannot wait for you to hear those interviews. We're back with more lukewarm takes about the media tomorrow. Joel Anderson will be here. I'll talk to you that. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies.

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