• last year
Transcript
00:00 No year-end best movie list is definitive because no year of movie-going experience can be reduced to bullet points, nor should it be.
00:09 Particularly now, when we can watch so many new movies without leaving our homes, the experience of watching has changed, and in ways we may never be able to fully reckon with.
00:20 You can watch a great movie at home and fully acknowledge its greatness.
00:24 After all, streaming older movies or watching them on physical media is how most of us learn about movie history.
00:31 But a year of new movies, whether you watch them at home or not, should be much more expansive than your living room.
00:38 Following are 10 movies that kept me thinking in the hours, days, and months after I watched them.
00:53 It's impossible to get through life without messing a few things up, but how much messing up is too much.
00:59 At the center of Ira Sack's half-funny, half-melancholy passages is a self-centered filmmaker played in a dazzling performance by Franz Rogowski,
01:09 who windmills through life with reckless disregard for the feelings of those around him, including his husband and the young woman who has temporarily entranced him.
01:19 At best, he's exasperating. At worst, he inflicts deep and lasting pain. And still you feel something for him.
01:27 His electricity is also his curse, and as this love triangle unfolds, it may leave you feeling the charge and the anguish all at once.
01:39 There are two types of people in the world. Those who view rock and roll dreams as small things you eventually grow out of,
01:46 and those who never stop living them, even if they confine their dream time to the spiral grooves of sides A and B.
01:54 Bill Pollad's Dreamin' Wild, based on real-life events and starring Casey Affleck and Walton Goggins, is for the second group,
02:02 a story about what happens when two people who sought pop stardom as teenagers get a second chance in middle age.
02:09 Music can mean a lot in one lifetime. It can break dreams, but it can also mend them.
02:14 Movies dealing with the specifics of women's experience are still a relative rarity on the movie landscape.
02:27 How many studio execs are going to leap at the chance to finance a film about the onset of menses and, by suggestion, its lunar twin, menopause?
02:37 Featuring a superb cast, including Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie, and Abby Rider Fortson,
02:44 Kelly Freeman Craig's adaptation of Judy Blume's 1970 coming-of-age classic is largely about the confusion of adolescence,
02:53 and also, more subtly, it addresses what it means for women to say goodbye to all that as they hit middle age.
03:00 This is a great movie for young people, but maybe even a better one for those who find themselves looking through the far end of the telescope.
03:08 To watch Lily Gladstone in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon is to recapture a thread of history that has, until recently, eluded most of us.
03:22 Scorsese has made a somber, poetic adaptation of David Graham's account of how a group of greedy white men systematically murdered members of the Osage Nation in early 1920s Oklahoma.
03:35 As Molly Burkhardt, a rich Osage woman whose family was gradually killed off around her,
03:41 Gladstone gives face to a million stories that have been conveniently forgotten in modern America.
03:47 Scorsese's mournful epic also features bigger movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro,
03:54 but Gladstone's Molly is the soul of the film, and he knows it.
03:59 In writer-director Celine Song's stirring debut film, a Korean immigrant who has built a life for herself in Toronto and New York reconnects with a childhood friend she left behind years ago.
04:14 Her husband stands by, a witness to the subterranean crackle of their connection.
04:20 "In any life, there are an infinite number of roads not taken. We can be on only one road at a time."
04:27 Song's movie is all about the mournful beauty of missed opportunities, a recognition of the truth that yearning is part of life.
04:35 Without it, all we're left with is false certainty, perhaps the greatest dishonesty of all.
04:42 The brother of French writer-director Alice Winacourt survived the 2015 terrorist attack at the Badecon concert hall in Paris.
04:52 Unable to communicate with him as he hid, she had to wait to hear if he'd made it out alive.
04:58 In Revoir, Paris, Virginia Afeera gives a shattering performance as a woman who survives a similar but fictional attack,
05:06 though the meaning of survival here is complex.
05:09 Afeera's Mia can't recall much of the traumatic event, but over time she finds her way back to life and to feeling
05:18 by connecting with others whose lives were also broken by the tragedy.
05:22 Without preciousness or platitudes, Winacourt and Afeera plumb the stark and sometimes painful truth of what it means to commit to the world of the living.
05:35 Elvis is everywhere, even 46 years after his death.
05:40 But what about Priscilla Boleo Presley, the woman he met when he was a 24-year-old soldier stationed in Germany and she was just a girl of 14?
05:49 Sofia Coppola's film, adapted from Priscilla Presley's 1985 memoir, brings this story to the screen with infinite tenderness.
05:58 Jacob Elordi plays Elvis, a great artist and a messed up man who mistreated the woman he loved most.
06:05 But the movie belongs to Caylese Bainey as Priscilla, preternaturally self-possessed as a young teenager,
06:12 but both wiser and more resilient by age 27 when her marriage to royalty ended.
06:18 Bainey walks us through this extraordinary but also painful span of time in one woman's life,
06:24 one satin slipper step after another.
06:28 The everyday things many of us want and need, plenty of food, marital companionship, a safe and comfortable home,
06:37 are the same things German SS officer Rudolf Haas, the longtime commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig, wanted for themselves and their family.
06:48 In Jonathan Glaser's ghostly, ice-cold film, adapted from the 2014 Martin Amis novel,
06:56 Sandra Huller plays Hedwig, who runs her household with starched linen efficiency,
07:02 vaguely cognizant of the horrors being perpetrated beyond her garden walls, but viewing them as an annoyance rather than an atrocity.
07:11 Christian Friedel's Haas is highly inventive when it comes to pleasing the higher-ups.
07:17 His ideas are a fuel for evil.
07:20 The zone of interest isn't just a semi-fictionalized view of history.
07:24 It's also a story for the here and now, a reminder that happiness built on the suffering of others is no kind of happiness at all.
07:33 And if nothing seems in you, then you can't make music.
07:40 Pledging your life to another person is not for the faint of heart.
07:45 Bradley Cooper's maestro, less a biopic than a window into a complex, passionate marriage, is a modern rarity,
07:53 an example of a starry, big-ticket production put to use in telling a truly grown-up story.
07:59 Cooper stars as conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, complicated and charismatic as both an artist and a man.
08:07 Carey Mulligan gives one of the finest performances of the year, a portrait of both steeliness and human fragility,
08:14 as the Costa Rican-Chilean actor Felicia Montalegre, who became Bernstein's wife and the mother of his three children.
08:22 This is grand-scale filmmaking that's also bracingly intimate.
08:27 A tentative romance between a woman who is making the best of dreary workaday life
08:34 and a metal worker whose perpetual drunkenness keeps him underemployed, plus one great dog.
08:40 Those are the main ingredients of Finnish filmmaker Aki Koraismaki's "Fallen Leaves," and he works magic with them.
08:47 Koraismaki is the master of the deadpan humanist comedy, the type of picture that people may think of as merely odd or charming.
08:55 Yet so much of life is made up of little revelations that form the core of who we are.
09:00 This is Koraismaki's gift, to catch those moments, seemingly snatching them from the wind,
09:07 and to put them on screen so that we too will know them when we see them.
09:12 Here are the 10 television series that stood out in 2023.
09:33 "Poker Face" Natasha Lyonne stars as a rumpled citizen detective in a Columbo homage created by Rian Johnson.
09:42 The show could have been made on autopilot and still charmed viewers.
09:46 Instead, we got 10 episodes of case-of-the-week magic that sent Lyonne's human polygraph on a cross-country road trip,
09:54 pausing to solve murders at barbecue joints, retirement communities, and more.
09:59 Each stop was its own social world, populated by delightful guest stars like Chloe Sevigny, Nick Nolte, and Hong Chao.
10:08 And before the mysteries could get too cozy, Johnson upped the stakes and challenged Lyonne's wabi-sabi sage persona,
10:16 setting up a second season that's bound to surprise.
10:28 "The Other Two" The Other Two premiered with a narrow premise.
10:32 A teen finds overnight fame as a Justin Bieber clone, and his underachieving adult siblings ride his coattails.
10:39 But it evolved into a sharp, consistently hilarious satire of the entertainment industry at large.
10:45 Matriarch Pat became a window into the cult of the daytime talk show queen.
10:50 Eldest son Carrie exemplified the humiliations of the D-list actor and would-be gay icon.
10:57 And sister Brooke learned to swim in shark-infested boardrooms.
11:01 The show's third and final season was the biggest and smartest of all,
11:05 capturing the demented ambition, streaming fatigue, and fickle politics that define contemporary Hollywood.
11:12 "Dead Ringers" The year's most unlikely reboot was also its most inspired.
11:18 In repurposing David Cronenberg's 1988 horror movie about twin OB/GYNs torn asunder when one falls for a glamorous patient,
11:27 creator Alice Birch entrusted the brilliant Rachel Wise with the dual role originated by Jeremy Irons.
11:34 No shallow gender flip, the adjustment endowed the allegory with new layers of meaning.
11:39 This "Dead Ringers" meets a moment when women's bodies are a battleground,
11:43 a humane birth experience has become a luxury item, and the ghosts of brutal reproductive research past
11:50 cast dark shadows over the high-tech obstetrics of the present.
11:56 "Telemarketers" True crime docuseries are more numerous but also more formulaic than ever.
12:02 "Telemarketers" is different.
12:04 Drawing on wild footage he shot of fellow employees cutting up at the anything-goes offices of a notorious telemarketing company,
12:12 co-director Sam Lipman Stern embarks on a quest to expose an industry that's even shadier than it seems.
12:19 While the series' mood is light, the investigation couldn't be more serious.
12:24 With former co-worker Patrick J. Pespis as citizen journalist and moral beacon,
12:29 Lipman Stern unravels a web of amoral entrepreneurs, corrupt police organizations, and government cowardice.
12:39 "You know you can tell me anything, right?"
12:42 "Of course."
12:44 "The Curse"
12:46 Nathan Fielder follows last year's brain-breaking "The Rehearsal" by teaming up with Benny Safdie and Emma Stone
12:52 for a scripted series that burrows even deeper into the fraught relationships between reality TV and reality.
13:00 In dissecting the interactions of a couple shooting an eco-conscious real estate series for HGTV,
13:06 Fielder and co-creator Safdie touch third-rail issues like gentrification, cultural appropriation, and colonialism.
13:14 The precision with which each episode provokes and unsettles echoes such masters of productive discomfort as Hitchcock and Kafka.
13:24 "What is your problem? What?"
13:30 "Beef"
13:34 What could be more timely than a show about anger?
13:38 Creator Lee Seung-jin casts Ali Wong and Steven Yeun as LA drivers whose road rage encounter escalates into a prank war that threatens to ruin both of their lives.
13:49 Each party's fury is rooted in a lifetime of repression.
13:53 While the show isn't about Asian American identities per se,
13:57 it's grounded in the ethnic communities to which the characters belong and specific to protagonists grappling with inequality, stereotyping, and the expectations of immigrant parents.
14:09 Darkly hilarious but also profoundly observant, "Beef" pairs the racially-tinged negative emotions that the poet Cathy Park Hong famously named "minor feelings" with major stakes.
14:21 "Hey! Are you guys leaving or are you just gonna sit there?"
14:25 "What'd you say? What'd you say?"
14:26 "Say it again! I dare you to say it again!"
14:28 "I promise you I will write us out of here."
14:34 "No, don't promise. Just try."
14:37 An intimate portrait of a fascinatingly unconventional family, "Rain Dogs" follows a peep show dancer and aspiring writer struggling to support her tween daughter with dubious help from her recently incarcerated gay best friend.
14:51 He comes from a posh family. She can rarely make rent.
14:55 He's a sadist. She has masochistic tendencies.
14:58 They're toxic together, and they know it, but they can't stand to be apart.
15:02 Creator Cash Carraway strikes the perfect balance of grit, warmth, and scathing British humor, ensuring that this dramedy neither trivializes its characters' pain nor devolves into a pity party.
15:14 "I'm a Virgo"
15:20 The streaming arm of a megacorp led by one of the world's richest people kicked off 2023's hot labor summer with this flagrantly anti-capitalist comedy from radical rapper and sorry-to-bother-you filmmaker Boots Riley.
15:35 His surreal allegory casts Jharrel Jerome as Cootie, a 13-foot-tall teen folk hero for our times and a gentle giant who must learn that powerful forces within American society will always see a strong black man as a thug and a threat.
15:52 Riley's secret weapons are humor and humanism.
15:56 His message may be militant, but he delivers it in a package cushioned by laughs, love, and a lively vision of liberation.
16:05 "Succession" and "Reservation Dogs"
16:13 This was the rare year when two series brilliantly in their own ways fulfilled the potential of television.
16:20 "Succession," an Emmy-winning drama that drove water-cooler conversation, was the obvious choice.
16:26 Creator Jesse Armstrong and his virtuosic cast didn't waste a second of the show's final arc, which unfolded largely in the aftermath of media mogul Logan Roy's ingeniously executed mid-air death.
16:39 Every episode earned the fanfare that greeted it.
16:42 Swedish tech edgelord Lucas Mattson waging psychological warfare on the Roy kids in Norway.
16:48 That white-knuckle election episode.
16:50 That tour-de-force funeral episode.
16:53 The bangers just kept coming.
16:55 And the finale made the biggest bang of all, ending a race to the bottom that everyone, especially the broken Roy siblings, won.
17:03 "I'm here to tell you a tale as old as time."
17:10 "Reservation Dogs," by contrast, never chased the zeitgeist.
17:14 Sterling Harjo's dramedy chronicled the hijinks of outsiders, Native American teens on a reservation mourning a friend who died by suicide.
17:23 Profane, poignant, at times psychedelic, the series moved fluidly between adolescent awkwardness, small-town character comedy, indigenous spirituality, and the righteous anger of the disenfranchised.
17:38 While the teenage res dogs remained at the show's center, its circle kept expanding until it encompassed the entire community, young and old, living and spectral.
17:49 Yet the two shows had plenty in common.
17:51 Both were irreverent. Both mixed poetically foul-mouthed comedy and tragedy.
17:56 Both had profound things to say about the sociopolitical realities of our time, insights they accessed through finely wrought characters unique to their worlds.
18:07 Lonely masters of the universe in one case, members of a disadvantaged but fiercely loving community in the other.
18:14 Together, they capture the polarized extreme of American life in the year that was.
18:20 Here are Time Magazine's Top 10 Favorite Games of the Year.
18:33 Number 10. Dredge.
18:36 One of the most pleasant surprises came from New Zealand indie developer Black Salt Games.
18:41 What initially appears to be a normal fishing game takes a disturbing dive into Lovecraftian lore.
18:46 While the game lacks the polish of its AAA counterparts, eye-catching art design, great use of sound, and an ambitious format built into a seemingly simple gameplay, make Dredge one to play and Black Salt Games one to watch.
18:58 Number 9. Diablo IV.
19:01 The iconic dungeon crawler returned with more classes, more weapons, and more demons to slay.
19:06 Blizzard Entertainment's fourth core game in the series plays much like the previous ones.
19:11 While the game has faced some criticism over its somewhat repetitive nature, it's a formula that has been proven to work for the franchise.
19:17 As far as play-at-your-own-leisure games go this year, Diablo IV is one of the strongest and bloodiest.
19:23 Number 8. Star Wars Jedi Survivor.
19:26 Respawn an EA sequel to Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, except five years after the events of the first game.
19:32 The game offers new customizable features, like Kestis' appearance, force abilities, and lightsaber stance.
19:38 As fun as the new features are, it's the emotional storytelling that makes the game such a balanced experience.
19:44 Number 7. Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
19:47 Wonder is the first side-scrolling Mario game since 2012's New Super Mario Bros. U, inviting plenty of nostalgia.
19:54 It's a great entry-point game, especially for younger players getting into Mario up in the recent movie.
19:59 For older gamers, it still feels like classic Mario, but now with better graphics, which means there's plenty to love and little to explain in terms of gameplay.
20:07 Number 6. Dead Space.
20:10 The remake of the iconic survival horror game from Motive Studio and EA may retell a familiar story, but don't let that fool you into thinking that you know what's around every corner.
20:19 It's an incredibly designed game, with lighting and sound design that not only takes full advantage of the current-gen systems,
20:25 but creates an end result so terrifying that it forces the player to take a deep breath and check their supplies before venturing forward at every point.
20:32 Number 5. Resident Evil 4.
20:35 The best entry of the Resident Evil series gets an upgrade that is more than worthy of the original's reputation.
20:41 One of the biggest improvements to the game is that Ashley has a lot more agency, and feels more like a partner to Leon rather than being a constant chore for him to keep track of.
20:50 All of these improvements and additions make RE4 a more enthralling adventure, and a high point for contemporary survival horror.
20:57 Number 4. The Legend of Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom.
21:01 The sequel to 2017's Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom is the result of the planned DLC content for Breath of the Wild growing too ambitious.
21:09 Nintendo's Tears of the Kingdom permits the time and space for all of that ambition to get the spotlight it rightly deserves.
21:15 It's easy to get lost in the beauty of the game and just explore,
21:18 but the compelling story, linked to the ancient history of Hyrule, always brings the player back to the central quest in solving the mysteries that await there.
21:26 Number 3. Spider-Man 2.
21:29 One of the most anticipated games of the year, the follow-up to Insomniac's Spider-Man and Spider-Man Miles Morales
21:35 is an epic and emotional journey that furthers the themes of the previous two games and allows the characters and the city they inhabit to evolve.
21:42 While the game may be a little shorter than Spider-Man, the side quests are more meaningful and work better within the context of the game's themes on the finite nature of time.
21:51 Ironically, Spider-Man 2 is a game you just won't want to end.
21:55 When it does, we're left with the greatest superhero game ever made.
21:59 Number 2. Baldur's Gate 3.
22:02 Based on Dungeons and Dragons, Baldur's Gate 3 is set in the open world of the Forgotten Realms.
22:07 The supporting characters and relationships you can develop really make Baldur's Gate 3 a special experience.
22:12 Given the length of the game, which is well over 100 hours, there's plenty to explore, both on your own or with friends,
22:18 making Baldur's Gate 3 the gamer gift that keeps on giving.
22:22 Number 1. Alan Wake 2.
22:24 Some believed it would never happen, but after 13 years, the cult game Alan Wake finally has a proper follow-up, and it's a doozy.
22:31 More than just another video game, Alan Wake 2 is a complex yet rewarding narrative, and it's a game worth revisiting to discover additional clues and connections.
22:40 Just remember to stay in the light.
22:43 It's that time of year again. Time just published our list of the 100 must-read books of 2023.
22:57 I'm here to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we made the list.
23:01 Our process always starts at the beginning of the year, or even a few months before.
23:09 It takes at least 12 months of reading, researching, discussing, and deliberating to get to the final result.
23:16 We have a dedicated group of readers from across the newsroom who get assignments from our books team every month,
23:22 and we gather on a regular basis to talk about everything we've read and what we thought.
23:27 It's a lot of fun. It's like a book club where everybody reads something different.
23:30 To get to 100, we really strive to consider different publishers and imprints, different genres and themes, and authors of different backgrounds.
23:39 We want the final result to include multiple options for every reader.
23:43 Check out the 2023 list at time.com.
23:46 My favorite book of the year is The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donohue.
23:50 YN by Esther Yee.
23:53 My favorite book of 2023 was Guest by Emma Klein.
23:56 It's definitely an anxious girl book, and I'm an anxious girl.
23:59 I am reading right now Burn of Wood by Eleanor Ketton, and it's definitely already one of my favorite books of the year.
24:06 And if you've read it just last night, I got to the part where that thing happens, and that's crazy.
24:10 And I can't wait to get back to reading it more.
24:12 [music]

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