‘The Brutalist’ Review: Director Brady Corbet Breaks Through in His Third Feature, an Engrossing Epic Starring Adrien Brody as a Visionary Architect
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you see only one madly ambitious, wildly allegorical movie this year about a fabled architect whose dream is to design buildings that define the future, make that movie “The Brutalist.” I’m saying, in other words, that you should choose “The Brutalist,” the third feature directed by Brady Corbet, over Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” an architect saga that’s diverting for about an hour, until it descends into a folly that’s anything but grand.
Why did Coppola, the great retro classicist of the New Hollywood, ever convince himself that he was an avant-garde visionary? “Megalopolis” is a movie that crashes into glittering fragments.
But with “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet goes in the opposite direction. His first two films, the fascist parable “The Childhood of a Leader” (2015) and the pop-star parable “Vox Lux” (2018), had flashes of brilliance amid a sea of indulgence.
But “The Brutalist” comes close to being a work of retro classicism. It’s three hours and 15 minutes long, it’s paced with a pleasing stateliness and overflows with incident and emotion — and it spins out the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who journeys from Budapest to America after World War II, as if Corbet were making a biopic about a real person.
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