The Brutalist

Released in 2024, The Brutalist is the third feature directed by Brady Corbet, after The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018). Co-written with Mona Fastvold, the film was shot on VistaVision, runs 215 minutes including a 15-minute intermission, and premiered in Competition at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where Corbet won the Silver Lion for Best Director. It went on to receive ten Academy Award nominations and won three, including Best Actor for Adrien Brody.

Brody plays László Tóth, a fictional Bauhaus-trained architect, opposite Felicity Jones as his wife Erzsébet and Guy Pearce as the industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren. Cinematographer Lol Crawley shoots the post-war American landscape (largely filmed in Hungary on a famously modest budget) in long, vertiginous takes, and Daniel Blumberg's score, written for orchestra and prepared piano, won the Oscar for Best Original Score. The film's mid-century type design and intermission card consciously evoke the long-form American epics of the 1950s.

Critical response was unusually strong for a 21st-century mid-budget film: the AFI placed it on its Top 10 of 2024, it dominated the Golden Globes drama categories, and it took multiple BAFTAs as well as its three Oscars. The reception extended into architectural and cultural criticism, where the film was debated as both a serious portrait of post-war émigré ambition and an audacious test of the contemporary audience's appetite for slow-built, large-scale European storytelling.