One of the best movies of 2024 is a stunning triumph

We have to be careful when we use the word “masterpiece,” and yet it seems entirely appropriate for Brady Corbett’s monumental achievement, The Brutalist. Years in the making (at one point, a completely different cast has been announced for the film), Corbert’s sprawling, nearly four-hour epic is cut from the same cloth (or perhaps I should say hewn from the same stone) as great masterpieces like Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and most recently, “There will be blood.” And like those three films, The Brutalist is a distinctly American masterpiece; a story that captures the triumphs and horrors of that ethereal thing we call the American Experience. These are stories about great men consumed by wild, potentially dangerous ambitions, and how they found a way to anchor those ambitions in an America of the past that was still evolving, a thing that was constantly changing and growing, impossible to pin down.

All of Corber’s films are like fake history lessons; biopics for people who never existed but to feel are real. His debut feature, the ominous Childhood of a Leader, tells the story of the would-be dictator’s youth in early 20th-century Europe. Corbert followed suit “Vox Lux”, the gloriously deceptive story of an American pop star in the 2000s (the film was released in 2018, but Corbett says he deliberately ended the film’s chronology in 2017 “so that audiences watching it in 2018 will perceive it as recent history rather than a contemporary film”). Now, in The Brutalist, Corbett, who often works with screenwriter Mona Fastwald, tells the story of an immigrant emerging in post-World War II America.

Spanning decades (the film begins in the late 1940s and ends in the 1980s), The Brutalist is nothing short of stunning; a stunning, brilliant, wonderful piece of work that needs to be widely reviewed. It seems almost miraculous. Although Corbert’s film runs a whopping 215 minutes (including a 15-minute intermission), it never drags. Indeed, it may be one of the fastest three hour and thirty five minute movies you will ever see. If Corbett had given the film another full hour, I don’t think I would have complained. Even when the intermission came, I found myself hoping it would be over soon so I could get back to the movie.

Shot in beautiful VistaVision, a technique that allows Corbett and cinematographer Lol Crowley to create huge shots that feel somehow ripped from the story itself, The Brutalist is cinematic alchemy, enhanced and enhanced by meticulous design and costumes that feel completely authentic to demonstrations different periods of time, helping a lot of brilliant performances, and covered By Daniel Blumberg’s loud, brooding, jazz-infused score—a score that Corbett calls “both minimalist and maximalist”—creates a sense of movement. One of the best movies of 2024, one of the best movies of the last 10 years, The Brutalist is a movie that reminds you why you love movies.