
The Brutalist. 2024. USA. Directed by Brady Corbet. Screenplay by Corbet, Mona Fastvold. With Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce. 35mm courtesy A24. In English, Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian; English subtitles. 215 min.
Brady Corbet’s epically ambitious, scrappily made third feature, shot in widescreen VistaVision with a 15-minute intermission, gives hope for a new American cinema that puts singular creativity above superhero franchise profligacy. In a career-defining performance, Adrien Brody is a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who brings his Bauhaus architecture training, and the weight of his suffering, to smalltown Pennsylvania. His uncompromising modernist vision becomes both a seduction and a threat to his patrician client (a smoothly entitled Guy Pearce) and as their struggle between art and commerce grows fierce, the film does not flinch from offering a tortured and at times sardonic portrait of historical trauma, reinvention, beauty and cruelty, and even the birth of a nation.
Runtime includes 15-minute intermission