The Brutalist is Three Hours of Prestige Torture, and I'm Here for It

Let me be direct: The Brutalist is not a movie you "enjoy" in the way you enjoy a cappuccino or a episode of The Bear. It's a movie you survive. You endure it the way you endure a 14-mile hike—miserable in real-time, but somehow meaningful when you're done.

Brady Corbet has made a film about Laszlo Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and immigrates to America with nothing but hunger and vision. Adrien Brody plays him, and honestly? Best work he's done in twenty years. The film tracks Tóth's rise, his obsession, his collision with an American industrial magnate (Guy Pearce, absolutely unhinged) who becomes his patron and eventual tormentor. It's Citizen Kane meets There Will Be Blood by way of The Fountainhead, except Corbet actually has something to say about ambition rather than just fetishizing it.

Here's the thing people won't tell you: the movie drags. There's a 45-minute middle section that tests your commitment. Characters repeat themselves. Conversations loop. And I think—I think—that's intentional. It's about obsession eating itself. It's about the way ambition becomes a kind of torture you inflict on yourself. The boredom is the point.

The VistaVision cinematography is genuinely stunning. Wide shots of brutalist concrete structures that look like monuments to human ego. Every frame could be a painting. Corbet knows how to use that format—not as a gimmick but as a statement about scale, about how capitalism makes us feel small even as we're trying to build empires.

What infuriates me about the discourse is people calling this "pretentious." No. Pretentious is boring stuff dressed up in expensive clothes. This is ambitious stuff that occasionally stumbles but never apologizes. There's a difference. Yes, it's long. Yes, you'll check your phone. But when Tóth stands in front of his masterpiece at the end, broken and vindicated and destroyed, it lands because Corbet earned it through three hours of uncompromising filmmaking.

Will it be in your top five movies ever? Probably not. Will you respect anyone who sits through it? Absolutely. It's the kind of film that separates people who actually care about cinema from people who just consume content. That's not elitist—that's honest.

SKIP IT:

Wicked (the movie) — I get it, the spectacle, the Ariana Grande fan service. But this is two-and-a-half hours of a musical that didn't need to be made, executed with the energy of a high school production designed by a committee. The songs don't hit when you're not already in the fandom. Save your money, rewatch the original Broadway recording instead.

SLEEPER PICK:

Sing Sing (Max) — A documentary about incarcerated men making theater together. Sounds worthy and exhausting. It's neither. It's funny, tender, and genuinely moving without ever asking for your tears. Find it.