Movie Review – The Brutalist
Director: Brady Corbet
Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn
Year: 2024
Look. I’m just gonna say it. The Brutalist is the best movie I’ve seen in years.
And I KNOW how that sounds. I know. Every year some three-hour prestige drama comes out and critics fall over themselves calling it a masterpiece and then six months later nobody remembers it. I’ve been burned before. We all have. But this one is different. This one actually earned those three and a half hours of my life and I’d give them again. Right now. Tonight. Pour me a whiskey and press play.
Adrien Brody plays László Toth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to America in 1947 looking for. I don’t know. Hope? A fresh start? The American Dream or whatever we’re calling it these days. He ends up in Pennsylvania working for this wealthy industrialist played by Guy Pearce who recognizes his talent and becomes his patron. And if you’re thinking “oh so it’s a heartwarming story about immigrant success” then buddy you have not been paying attention to how America actually works.
Because here’s the thing. The movie is ABOUT the American Dream but it’s not buying what the American Dream is selling. László builds these incredible brutalist structures — massive concrete monuments to his vision — but every step of the way the system is trying to break him. The money people want to own him. The establishment doesn’t trust him because of his accent, his religion, his foreignness. He’s talented enough to be useful but never quite American enough to be accepted. Sound familiar? Yeah.
Brody is. God. Brody is unbelievable in this. I forgot I was watching an actor. He carries this weight through the whole film, this exhaustion of always having to prove yourself in a country that invited you in but never really wanted you there. There’s this scene — I won’t spoil it but it involves Guy Pearce’s character and it happens in the second half and I genuinely had to pause the movie and walk around my apartment for a minute. That hasn’t happened to me since I watched There Will Be Blood for the first time.
Speaking of which. Yeah. This movie is in conversation with There Will Be Blood. Same epic American scope. Same slow burn that suddenly erupts into something devastating. Same feeling that you’re watching capital-C Cinema, the kind they don’t really make anymore except apparently they do because Brady Corbet made this for under 10 million dollars and shot it on VistaVision like it’s 1954 and somehow it looks better than movies with ten times the budget.
The runtime. Okay. Let’s talk about the runtime. Three hours and thirty-five minutes with an intermission. I saw people complaining about this online and. Look. If you can’t sit still for three hours to watch something beautiful then maybe the problem isn’t the movie. I’ve watched four-hour Scorsese films. I’ve binged entire seasons of TV in a sitting. This flew by. The pacing is deliberate but it’s not slow. Every scene is doing something. Corbet knows what he’s doing.
Felicity Jones plays László’s wife Erzsébet and she’s excellent even though she’s not in as much of the movie as you’d expect from the billing. Joe Alwyn shows up as Guy Pearce’s son and he’s. Fine. He’s fine. The real second lead here is Pearce who is doing this thing where you can’t tell if his character is genuinely trying to help or if he’s just another rich guy who wants to own an artist like a trophy. Probably both. That’s the point.
The score is by Daniel Blumberg and it’s going to win the Oscar and it deserves to. There’s this brass theme that comes back throughout the film and every time it hit I felt something in my chest. Physical reaction to music in a film. When’s the last time that happened to you.
I have minor complaints. The ending goes on maybe one scene too long. There’s a coda that I think the movie didn’t need but also didn’t ruin anything. And look — there’s been some controversy about the production using AI to help with the Hungarian accents and I don’t know how I feel about that. It doesn’t sound fake to me but the principle of it bothers me in a way I can’t fully articulate. Ask me again in five years when AI has either destroyed filmmaking or turned out to be nothing.
But those are nitpicks. This is a movie that will be studied. This is a movie that will still matter in fifty years. This is the kind of ambitious, difficult, deeply human filmmaking that Hollywood has mostly abandoned in favor of franchise content and nostalgia bait.
Brady Corbet made an American epic about what America actually does to people who believe in it. And Adrien Brody made me believe every second of it.
Go see this in a theater if you can. 70mm if possible. It deserves that.
My rating: ★★★★★
