The Brutalist

Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold's screenplay refuses the inspirational-artist template. László's Bauhaus training is respected by the film but never romanticized by the culture around him. His patron, Harrison Van Buren, needs a monument more than he needs a building — and the film is attentive to that distinction.

The central argument is that post-war American prosperity absorbed European modernism by translating it into a product. László's fight to preserve proportions, ceiling heights, and material specifications is the film's spine, and it is dramatized with the specificity of a courtroom drama.

Brody plays László's Hungarian accent, posture, and physical depletion with extraordinary consistency. He makes addiction, grief, and professional stubbornness coexist inside a single character without resolving them for the audience's comfort.

Guy Pearce's Van Buren is the film's most dangerous performance. Pearce plays patronage as a form of possession and never lets the charm fully mask the coercion. Felicity Jones, as László's wife Erzsébet, arrives in Part Two and recalibrates the moral geometry of the film in a single dinner scene.

Shot on VistaVision for the first time in decades, the film's physical scale is a political statement. Lol Crawley's photography is monumentally composed without being sterile, and the fifteen-minute intermission mid-film is treated as a genuine formal choice rather than a marketing hook.

Daniel Blumberg's score — brass-heavy, modal, dissonant — is the most distinctive film score of 2024. It borrows from modernist composition the way the building László is drawing borrows from Bauhaus.

Pros: A 215-minute runtime that is almost entirely justified; formal ambition at a level American cinema rarely attempts at this budget; Brody's best work in two decades.

Cons: Part Two is uneven, particularly a late-film plot turn that critics have legitimately questioned; the length is a real commitment; the intermission only exists in certain theatrical presentations.