Sunday’s Oscars ceremony was a productive night for The Brutalist, which scooped up the statuettes for cinematography, score, and best actor. Since the film’s release late last year, the deluge of acclaim for Brady Corbet’s epic, three-and-a-half hour tale of broken bones and busted dreams in post-Holocaust America has had a distinctly revivalist slant. Critics have praised both the expansiveness of the film’s vision—a return of sorts for Hollywood to grand Golden Age themes of exile, will, belonging, and loss—and its reinvigoration of several dormant photographic and narrative techniques: the intermission, the stock postwar character of the rich American jerk in Europe, and VistaVision, the widescreen format on which the feature was shot.
Read Full Article »
