The Brutalist has been receiving rapturous reviews ever since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September. That praise isn’t undeserved, by any means, especially since Adrien Brody gives a flawless performance as a brilliant Hungarian architect — an artist of genius — struggling to put his stamp on the American landscape in the years after World War II.
More importantly, perhaps, is the revelation that 36-year-old director Brady Corbet is that most worshipped kind of filmmaker, an auteur. (Put it this way: Who’s more celebrated, Philip Johnson or Quentin Tarantino?)
Corbet’s 3-hour-35-minute epic, which comes with an intermission, is a challenging, daringly ambitious take on 20th-century history, and clearly built on a foundation that has nothing to do with franchises or superheroes. The movie is its own rare, complete thing, sprawling and raw-boned….
