Something to watch tonight: Monday 10 November
The Brutalist (Corbet, 2024)
Editor’s note
Well, last week turned out to be a brutalist in its own right. I had a tooth extraction scheduled for Friday and was prescribed some antibiotics in advance of that and had a sudden and violent reaction to those on Wednesday night. It’s been all about recovery since then.
Over the next few days we’ll be getting back up to speed around these parts with a big ‘new releases’ catch-up scheduled for tomorrow.
Any and all inconveniences are regretted.
Thanks for all the positive feedback about At the Movies, by the way. It means a lot.
It’s a good time to have shares in VistaVision, the giant film format that modern auteurs are favouring for their big screen epics. Jorgos lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan shot last week’s Bugonia in the format, as did Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Bauman for One Battle After Another, but the film that kicked off the trend was Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist last year.
I was reviewing for RNZ At the Summer Movies at the time and was very moved by it:
It takes more than just length for a film to become an epic but at 215 minutes, plus a fifteen-minute interval, The Brutalist meets that first requirement. It also needs to be about something greater than just the domestic travails of its characters and it ticks that box, too.
This is a film about America and the promises made and broken by capitalism. But it’s also about something else, something I won’t reveal here because it comes in an epilogue at the end. It hits you like a gut punch and forces you to think again about everything you have just seen - even to the extent of wanting to rewatch the film immediately, from the beginning.
It’s not being clever for clever’s sake, it’s a genuinely brilliant and powerful film about trauma and the inadequacy of recovery, the impossibility of healing and the necessity of survival.
(Listen or read at RNZ.)
Also reviewed in that summer summary from 3 February this year: Mark Walhberg misfire Flight Risk, excellent local documentary The Haka Party Incident, operatic biopic Maria (now Netflix), clever horror Companion and the laboured wedding comedy You’re Cordially Invited (Prime).
Where to watch The Brutalist
Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix
Australia: Streaming on Netflix, FoxtelNow and Binge
Canada: Streaming on Prime Video
Ireland and UK: Streaming on Sky
India: Streaming on Hotstar
USA: Streaming on HBO Max