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‘The Brutalist’ Review: Brady Corbet’s American Epic of Art and Power

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist turns architecture into a drama of artistic ambition and power, following a Hungarian Jewish architect’s uneasy pursuit of reinvention in postwar America.
Opened Runtime4 min Written byDocumentaryTube Team
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Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist earns its monumental scale by making architecture part of the drama: every act of creation is entangled with money, privilege and the authority to decide what an artist is allowed to build. The film’s fictional Hungarian Jewish architect, László Tóth, arrives in postwar America carrying both the ambition to begin again and the trauma of what he has survived. The result is an imposing, often absorbing American epic—not an uncomplicated masterpiece, but a film whose formal ambition gives its conflict real weight.

What is The Brutalist about?

Set between 1947 and 1960, the film follows László Tóth, a fictional architect who emigrates from Hungary to the United States after surviving the Holocaust. He attempts to rebuild his life and career, while his connection to wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren brings his artistic ambitions into the orbit of money and influence. László’s story is fictional, not a biography of a real architect.

Adrien Brody plays László, Felicity Jones plays his wife, Erzsébet, and Guy Pearce plays Van Buren. Corbet and Mona Fastvold are credited as the screenplay’s writers. The official Venice Biennale listing and the British Council UK Films Database identify the film’s principal credits and premise.

Does the film’s scale serve its story?

The Brutalist is structured in two acts with an intermission, and its story covers thirteen years, from 1947 to 1960. A fictional Institute commissioned by Van Buren becomes the story’s physical center. As Architectural Record’s account of the film’s production design describes, the building is not simply a striking backdrop. It gives László’s ambition a visible form, while the terms of its commission expose how much control a patron can exert over the work.

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That integration is the film’s strongest formal idea. The architecture makes a private struggle legible: László wants to make something lasting, but the resources that let him build also place him in another man’s debt. The film’s monumental images therefore carry dramatic meaning rather than functioning only as spectacle.

The trade-off is momentum. Across its long span, the film accumulates pressure and consequence, but its deliberate scale can also diffuse the urgency of individual scenes. The intermission reinforces the sense of an epic divided into movements; it does not make the film’s full length feel equally necessary at every moment. Viewers drawn to patient, visually composed dramas are more likely to find the duration rewarding than those looking for a tightly propelled narrative.

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Performances under the pressure of patronage

Brody’s László is the film’s emotional anchor. He conveys a man whose creative drive is inseparable from the strain of displacement and survival, without reducing him to either a symbol of trauma or a triumphant immigrant. His reserve makes the character’s compromises and moments of resistance feel consequential.

Pearce gives Van Buren the polished confidence of a man accustomed to having his preferences treated as decisions. The imbalance between patron and artist becomes sharper because the film does not frame generosity as innocent: support can enable the work and still demand submission. Jones’s Erzsébet brings a necessary perspective on what László’s pursuit costs beyond the studio and the building site. In my judgment, Brody’s performance is the most affecting, while Pearce is especially effective at making power feel cordial before it turns coercive.

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What does the American setting mean?

America offers László the possibility of work and reinvention, but the film refuses to treat arrival as a clean beginning. His immigrant identity, Jewishness and experience of historical trauma remain part of the life he is trying to rebuild. The promise of opportunity is real, yet access to it is mediated by wealth and social standing. Van Buren can fund a vision; László must negotiate what that funding permits him to be.

Film at Lincoln Center’s description of the film foregrounds architecture, artistic ambition, money and privilege, religious identity, and historical trauma. Those concerns converge in the Institute: the structure embodies creative achievement, but its patronage also makes the limits of artistic independence concrete.

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Is The Brutalist a great American masterpiece?

“Great American masterpiece” is a defensible ambition for the film, not a verdict its scale can award itself. The Brutalist comes closest to earning it when its architecture, performances and immigrant story work together—when a building’s mass reflects the burden of its creation, and artistic freedom is shown to depend on who controls the money. Its length and occasional loss of narrative momentum keep it from feeling fully commanding throughout. Even so, Corbet has made a distinctive, serious American drama whose visual form is inseparable from its argument about art and power.

Where to watch or buy The Brutalist on disc

A24’s official shop listing offers the film on Blu-ray and 4K UHD, and lists its runtime as 215 minutes. The 4K UHD edition requires a 4K Blu-ray player; it will not play in a standard Blu-ray player. Choose the format that matches your equipment.

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