BRIAN VINER reviews The Brutalist: Tipped for an Oscar, this movie is full of grandeur and great acting
BRIAN VINER reviews The Brutalist: Tipped for an Oscar, this movie is full of grandeur and great acting
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The Brutalist (18, 214mins). Verdict: Impressive but flawed. Rating:. There is no swerving the irony that The Brutalist, a sweeping drama about the American immigrant experience, lands in cinemas in the very week that the 47th President of the United States starts the process of booting loads of them out.
![[Adrien Brody already has a Golden Globe for his lead performance as a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, released from the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp, arrives in the United States and begins to rebuild his life and career]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/24/00/94460503-14319845-image-a-2_1737680138310.jpg)
Mind you, almost five months have passed since the world premiere, at the Venice Film Festival, and the movie has been gathering awards ever since. Adrien Brody already has a Golden Globe for his lead performance as a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, released from the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp, arrives in the United States and begins to rebuild his life and career.
![[Guy Pearce stars as the volatile millionaire industrialist and socialite called Harrison Lee Van Buren]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/24/00/94460593-14319845-image-a-3_1737680154843.jpg)
Brody is an odds-on favourite to add an Oscar. Meanwhile, all kinds of lavish adjectives have been flung at writer-director Brady Corbet (also anointed with a Globe), and his co-writer Mona Fastvold, who is also his partner. Never mind their pillow-talk, imagine their pillar-talk.
![[Alessandro Nivola, left, with Adrien Brody. The pair hug as if daring fate ever to pull them apart again]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/24/00/94460515-14319845-image-a-4_1737680162493.jpg)
Their movie, with its twin themes of assimilation and architecture, has been described as ‘immense’, ‘monumental’, ‘dizzying’. And now I can add ‘euphoric’, but only because that’s how I felt on the arrival of the 15-minute intermission. The Brutalist is very long.
![[Lucy Liu stars in Steven Soderbergh's Presence, in less than an hour and a half, Soderbergh crafts a slick supernatural thriller that exerts an immediate grip and never lets go]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/24/00/94460523-14319845-image-a-5_1737680197786.jpg)
Adrien Brody (left) and Felicity Jones (right) in The Brutalist. Adrien Brody already has a Golden Globe for his lead performance as a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, released from the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp, arrives in the United States and begins to rebuild his life and career.
![[Flight Risk stars Michelle Dockery (pictured), striving admirably to erase all traces of Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/24/00/94460539-14319845-image-a-6_1737680203525.jpg)
