The Brutalist is a generational masterpiece

The New Hollywood era was defined by two films from Michael Cimino; The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate.

The Deer Hunter is one of the triumphs of the New Hollywood era; it was sandwiched between Star Wars in 1977 and Apocalypse Now in 1979 as a sign that the children of the Bonnie and Clyde revolution were now calling the shots.

With the release of Heaven’s Gate in 1980, the party came to an abrupt end as Cimino used all of his post-Oscar win with The Deer Hunter to create a sprawling epic set in the American wilderness where he waited for the right cloud to roll into view and went wildly overbudget in the process.

Heaven’s Gate ended up torpedoing Cimino’s career yet the film has gained an appreciation over the years as one of the last great American epics, a final swansong for an art form that became flooded with franchise tripe and multiverse nonsense.

Other directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson have attempted to capture that pioneering spirit in films like There Will Be Blood and Martin Scorsese produced one of his greatest miracles with 2023’s Killers Of The Flower Moon.

With The Brutalist, Brady Corbet has joined that elite club.

Telling the multi-decade story of Hungarian immigrant László Toth (played by an Oscar-worthy Adrian Brody) and his struggles to assimilate into post-war American society, there is a lyricism that makes The Brutalist soar. 

The one thing audiences should know going into the film is that yes, it’s absurdly long.

At 3 and a half hours (with intermission), you will get value for your ticket price but the epic running time as well as the way the film tells you it has an intermission feeds into the sense that this film thinks it’s important; and damn it, the film convinces you it is.

Already, there are debates in film circles is the first half better than the second half (for our money, yes, it is, but the second half is also really good) and there is a sense that The Brutalist has attained near-mythological status.

The Brutalist makes no apologies for being old-fashioned; it has an overture, long, patient tracking shots that recall the best of Lean, and a leisurely pace which invites viewers to really dig in.

The true test of whether The Brutalist will stack up to the likes of Doctor Zhivago, Solaris or The Leopard (all films The Brutalist has found itself in conversation with over the course of this awards season) will come many years down the line when this generation of film fans discover the film for themselves and they will decide if the film is worthy of being added to the canon.

Being compared to these generational classics is a lot of expectation for a film to live up to – what, it’s already being compared to Lean, Tarvosky and Visconti, you ask – but that tells you everything you need to know about the film.

The Brutalist is closer in scale to the novels of Upton Sinclair (a muckraking journalist turned novelist turned political candidate) and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America; it holds a mirror up to the American dream and asks the viewer if they think the dream is attainable, and what would you sacrifice to achieve it?

Of course, in the time since this review appeared in print concerns have been raised over the film’s supposed usage of AI for dialogue polish and image generation; it would be bitterly ironic if a film about the value of art and identity becomes the canary in the coalmine in the AI versus Art wars.

With all that said, The Brutalist is far and away the best film of the year and will be in the running for the best film of the decade when the time comes.

In a novel approach, The Brutalist was filmed in Vistavision, a technique used by Alfred Hitchcock in films like North By Northwest and John Ford in The Searchers.

In layman’s terms, Vistavision means that the screen is as wide as possible and offers more detail.

Corbert opted to shoot The Brutalist entirely in this format that hasn’t been used by the studio system in decades, so when coupled with a 70MM screening at the IFI (which Universal kindly put on for members of the press and necessitated another 15-minute intermission), it makes the experience utterly absorbing and overwhelming.

There are very few experiences like seeing an auteur present their vision of post-war America on a screen the size of a passenger plane; it is the stuff cinephile dreams are made of.

So, the film has enough technical pow-wow to get John and Mary Public to part with their money, what does the movie have to offer in front of the camera?

It has astounding performances, that’s what.

At the heart of the film, its engine, Adrian Brody gives a performance that ranks as his finest hour in a career full of them.

Brody possesses a skill that only an elite few have; if you read his face in a given moment, you know exactly what he’s thinking about. 

Guy Pearce’s performance as Harrison Lee Van Buren is similar to Matt Damon’s performance as Leslie Groves in Oppenheimer, a sense of “wow, where have they been hiding this kind of performance?”

Van Buren takes Toth under his wing, and the incredibly condescending and pithy tone he takes with Toth reveals some hidden depths to him that gradually begin to unravel.

Pearce is superb as the well-meaning but condescending man with more money than cents and one hopes it will be the start of a second act for the Aussie star.

Felicity Jones is the third, crucial piece of the acting jigsaw as László’s wife Erzsébet; anyone who saw The Theory Of Everything 10 years ago will be familiar with how empathetic and wonderful Jones can be and is able to play the big moments just as well as she can play the small roles.

Jones, like her co-stars, also turns in career-best work here.

There is a humanity and warmth – coupled with a simmering contempt for the people she’s with – that powers her performance, reminiscent of a vintage Vanessa Redgrave performance.

The genius of The Brutalist is that it has one eye on the past and tradition but is casting an eye to the future and legacy; this film has the quality of an epic from the pre-Code era but also feels like a very 2025 film in a lot of senses.

The Brutalist, through its many false starts in production and through a set of circumstances that no one could have quite predicted, finds itself releasing at this exact moment in culture where the very notion of identity and expression is being questioned and threatened in certain quarters.

If you engage with The Brutalist on its own terms you will come away dumbfounded and in awe of the ambition involved; dig a little deeper and you will find a generational masterpiece.