The Brutalist (2024)

This film clocks in at 3.5 hours, so maybe it is not surprising that within that kind of time frame you can pacak a lot in, but it covers so many things without specifically hammering, highlighting, or bullet-pointing them. Sure, it’s impossible to miss the commentary on capitalism and the casual cruetly of the super rich, but it’s also a story of immigration, addiction, Zionism, architecture, inequity, class, violence, and sexual predation. There are themes of generational trauma, particularly exploring the lasting impact of the Holocaust on a Hungarian-Jewish architect, László Tóth, who immigrates to post-war America, where his art and personal life are continuously shaped by his traumatic past, manifesting in his architectural designs and relationships with others; essentially, his buildings become a physical representation of his internal struggles with the trauma he carries from the concentration camps. László is a difficult man. The embodies brutalist architecture: it is stark, with clean lines, paradoxically somewhat ugly yet strangely beautiful. László is impactful, hard to like and hard to forget, all wrapped up with agony and self abuse. It is a masterful performance by Adrien Brody, whose grandmother was a Hungarian Jew who hid her ethnicity and whose mother, Sylvia Plachy, is a photographer. He said, "My mother and my grandparents owned a very similar journey of fleeing war-torn Europe and coming to the U.S. And the hardships and sacrifice and their own resilience and everything that they endured — in addition to my mother as an artist and her yearnings to leave behind a body of work of some great significance, they’re all things that are very personal to me. So I felt a deep responsibility to convey that authentically." Consider it done.