The Brutalist
Story Stream
Architecting a Myth March 04, 2025
I wonder if László Tóth escaped the Nazis by jumping out of a prison transport train? Director Brady Corbet does not tell us how Tóth, a fictional Hungarian Jewish émigré in America, survived the Holocaust in his epic The Brutalist. But towards the b...
High Infidelity March 04, 2025
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 hou...
Timothée Chalamet and the Rise of the Try-Hards March 04, 2025
There was a lot of hype that Timothée Chalamet, 29, might become the youngest man ever to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He did not take a trophy home last night—Adrien Brody snagged it for his turn in The Brutalist—but Chalamet should be appl...
Hollywood’s Obsession With AI-enabled ‘Perfection’ March 03, 2025
The notion of authenticity in the movies has moved a step beyond the merely realistic. More and more, expensive and time-consuming fixes to minor issues of screen realism have become the work of statistical data renderings—the visual or aural product...
REVIEW: ‘The Brutalist’ March 03, 2025
The most impressive film of 2024, up for 10 Oscars this weekend, is The Brutalist. It is an extraordinary achievement—nearly three-and-a-half hours and never less than gripping, beautifully rendered dialogue, stunning cinematography and music, all in...
Why ‘The Brutalist’ Is Brutal to Watch February 20, 2025
There’s no brutalist architecture in The Brutalist. This terrifically named film—directed by former child actor turned would-be auteur Brady Corbet; cowritten by him and his partner in life and work, the director Mona Fastvold; and production-designe...
Outwitting History February 18, 2025
Adrien Brody is the most beautiful man in Hollywood, and maybe on the planet. This has to do with the unlikely features of his face: it is profoundly narrow, with a pair of high brows sloping gently away from one another and a resolutely expressive p...
'The Brutalist' Is a Confounding but Beautiful Mess February 06, 2025
By now, you’ve probably heard some of the critical hype around The Brutalist. You may have also heard about the unique way in which it was all shot — in VistaVision, a high-resolution 70mm widescreen film format created by Paramount Pictures in 1954 ...
The Dubious Return of the Brutalists February 04, 2025
On April 21, 1989, members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) invaded the headquarters of Burroughs Wellcome, the pharmaceutical behemoth behind AZT, the only approved treatment for HIV. Burroughs Wellcome billed patients $8,000 a year f...
Empire of Signs January 29, 2025
Teotihuacan was, once, the center of the world. The pre-Aztec Teotihuacanos modeled their great capital in what is now central Mexico on the universe itself, imbuing their everyday lives with a sense of holy grandeur. Before the Temple of the Moon, a...
How the Academy Awards Adapted to Catastrophe January 24, 2025
Until two weeks ago, Oscar pundits were describing this awards season as “weird.” Unlike last year’s slate, dominated by Barbenheimer, the new crop of contenders had been thinned out by the actors’ and writers’ strikes, leaving room for such polarizi...
The Monumental Achievement of 'The Brutalist' January 21, 2025
The Brutalist has been much garlanded already as the awards season gathers pace. At Venice, creator Brady Corbet took the Silver Lion for best director. At the Golden Globes, it won Best Drama, Best Director and Best Actor. At the Baftas, it was nomi...
How “The Brutalist” Brutalizes History January 15, 2025
I am struggling to recall a film that made me as angry as The Brutalist did. The top-tier contender for Academy Awards Best Picture directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody as the fictional modernist architect László Tóth, who survives the ...
