David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The two movies facing off for the big holiday weekend at the box office are Wicked Part 1 and Gladiator 2. The New Yorker's critic Justin Chang reviewed both of them the other day and his review is a terrific read, but I wanted to hear from Justin what else I should be excited about in the crop of movies that comes out to the end of the year.

Justin Chang: During this time of year, people want a kind of prototypical holiday movie, something that will make them feel good. I'm always sorry to disappoint people every year, but my favorites are probably best described as downers. These are not upbeat movies.

David Remnick: No Elf.

Justin Chang: The one--

William Hobbs: Santa. Oh my God. Santa here. I know him.

Justin Chang: Oh, I love Elf. It's a staple. I am taking my eight-year-old to Moana 2, so I am hopeful about that one.

David Remnick: Well, since my kids are now too old for that and I'm waiting impatiently, impatiently for grandchildren, I'm going to sit that one out. Meanwhile, you've got three picks for us this season that you think will, in some way or another, make us happy.

Justin Chang: Yes, it's funny. I return to the words of Roger Ebert, who once said, "No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing." These are not happy movies, but they are among the most thrilling that I've seen this year, and I recommend them in a theater wholeheartedly. The first movie is Nickel Boys, which is an adaptation of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. This is the story of two young Black men played by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson in 1960s Florida, who are sent to a reform school, which is putting it very charitably, and I can't say this better, of course, than Colson Whitehead himself, who has this to say about the place and its real-life inspiration.

Colson Whitehead: Immediately, three years into being opened, there were kids as young as six being shackled, put in solitary confinement. Every 15 years, there'd be an expose and talk of reform, and nothing happened until it finally closed in 2011. I was shocked when it hit the national media. They found unmarked graves, they dug up the bodies, and found kids with shotgun pellets in their skeletons, blunt-force trauma to their skulls. I felt that if there's one place like this, how many other stories are we not hearing about?

Justin Chang: This is obviously incredibly fraught, painfully difficult material that was inspired by a real place and by real stories. I want to say, too, that what makes the movie extraordinary is the way that the director, RaMell Ross, uses the camera, and he and his cinematographer, Jomo Fray, they basically adopt a first-person point of view approach, meaning that at any given point in the story, you're seeing this story through the eyes of one of the two lead characters. It's a risky choice, and there's a reason why most narrative films are not shot this way.

David Remnick: It comes off.

Justin Chang: Although it's not unprecedented. Yes, but it comes off. It touches chords of feeling that I think a more conventional telling wouldn't have achieved. I should also mention that this movie features a really, really great performance from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who has I think been doing really terrific work all her career, but especially recently and especially in film, like she was in Origin last year, she has another movie in which she's very strong in this season called Exhibiting Forgiveness. In Nickel Boys, she plays the grandmother of one of the boys who is sent to this reform school. It's a beautiful performance and it lifts you even as you are watching this extremely, extremely painful story.

David Remnick: I'm really glad to hear that. I'm on Team Colson Whitehead. As much as I admired Underground Railroad as a novel, I wasn't completely sold on the film version. To hear that Nickel Boys works and more, that's really uplifting. What's your second choice?

Justin Chang: My second choice is The Brutalist, and this is the third feature directed by the actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbet. It stars Adrien Brody in probably the greatest role and performance he's had since he won an Oscar for The Pianist.

David Remnick: That was a long time ago.

Justin Chang: In this film, he is again playing a Holocaust survivor, this time a man of Hungarian Jewish descent who, before the war, was a very accomplished brutalist architect. The movie is all about how he comes to America and encounters, in Pennsylvania, a wealthy benefactor played by an absolutely terrific Guy Pearce. It's this hugely ambitious big swing of a movie from a 36-year-old director who is aiming for the rafters like a young Orson Welles or Paul Thomas Anderson making this really big movie about capitalism, about immigration, about Jewish assimilation, and eventually the exploitation of Jewish genius and labor in post-war America.

There are a lot of really big themes swirling around this movie. It handles them very assuredly. I should also note, David, for everyone, this movie is three and a half hours long, including a 15-minute intermission. I hasten to add, it flies by. It's incredibly absorbing. Don't be put off by the running time, go and see it on the big screen in 70 millimeter if you can, because it's going to be showing in that format.

David Remnick: No problem with the length. I really don't, when they're good. I just spent a Saturday watching straight through Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing. I think it was nine episodes, so there must have been seven hours of film. I was one happy boy. What's your third and final choice? Because you've got me twice into the theaters already.

Justin Chang: My third movie is called Hard Truths, and this is the latest picture from the English filmmaker Mike Leigh of movies like Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake. Mike Leigh, it's worth noting, he has a very particular style. He works very closely with his actors in a very rigorous and somewhat mysterious workshop process. From this process emerges a very tightly structured script and some of the best performances you'll ever see in the English language, frankly.

Hard Truths features, I think, the performance of the year from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who worked with Leigh before in Secrets and Lies, received an Oscar nomination for that movie. Here, almost 30 years later, she's back and playing a completely different character, a profoundly, profoundly unhappy person who just spends the movie sort of lashing out at everyone's sight, which doesn't sound like a fun way to spend your movie. It's two hours, but--

David Remnick: I think that's Mike Leigh's wheelhouse.

Justin Chang: It is Mike Leigh's wheelhouse. I mean, this is his great subject. He really taps into anger. I think his great theme, or one of them, is the uneven distribution of happiness. Why are some people happy and why are some people just not? It sounds like a very simple thing. From this, though, he gets so much complexity. This is a character played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who you would not want to be in the same room with her, but you absolutely want to see her on the big screen.

Pansy Beacon: Her over there with that fat baby, parading it around in the little outfit. Not dressed for the weather? Nah. With pockets. What's the baby got pockets for? What's it going to keep in its pocket?

Justin Chang: I was riveted. It's a very funny, a painfully funny performance at times. I think people are almost scared to admit that this is actually a very entertaining but also very forceful and devastating and angry movie. I know, not an orthodox recommendation.

David Remnick: Not at all. If you want to break in between some of these tougher movies, there's always Elf.

Justin Chang: It's always Elf.

David Remnick: Your three picks, Nickel Boys, Hard Truths, The Brutalist.

Justin Chang: Yes.

David Remnick: Justin, thanks so much.

Justin Chang: Thank you so much, David.

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