It sounds like something from another age: an American director venturing into his Citizen Kane without caring about the laws of the box office. But Brady Corbet will not regret his attempt.


Film: Brutally ambitious
The Brutalist stunned the Venice Film Festival and is leading the race to the Oscars. A fifteen-minute intermission disrupts the visually overwhelming, emotionally and thematically complex epic to allow you to catch a breath and sustain the ride of three hours and 35 minutes.
Adrien Brody’s animated performance grants him a chance to win a second Oscar. Just like in The Pianist, he dives deep into the psyche of a talented man who survived the Holocaust. Upon his arrival in America, the Hungarian Jew László Tóth is broken but determined to find himself again.
The building of a community centre north of Philadelphia with the money of a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) becomes an outright obsession. But traumas, heroin addiction, melancholy, ambition, and nasty antisemitism slow the visionary architect down in his urge for grandeur.
The relationship between artist and benefactors, between art and money, and the complexity of a world spinning on after the concentration camps also come into the picture. The Brutalist sometimes gets a little over the top and too bombastic or emphatic in its symbolism, but Corbet’s own urge for grandeur is fascinating.
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