163. Best Picture Showcase '25: THE BRUTALIST dir. Brady Corbet

Welcome to the Best Picture Showcase, a miniseries on THE MOVIES where I review each nominee for this year's Academy Award for Best Picture. With each installment, I hope to answer the following:1) What's the movie about?2) What's it feel like to sit through the movie?3) Did I like it?4) Should it and will it win Best Picture? What's my current ranking of the nominees?5) How can you catch this movie?I hope to make this list feel more accessible for folx intimidated or turned off by what they might derisively consider "Oscar Bait."So a 3.5 hour drama about a Hungarian refugee escaping the Holocaust to 1950s Pennsylvania is a great place to start, right? Brady Corbet's THE BRUTALIST works that artist's magic of making hyper-specific circumstances feel universal. This is a movie about a man who feels his life is robbed from him. In many ways, it was, and yet, that struggle between accepting his difficult realities of working back up from the bottom rung of the ladder & confidently striding with the experience and value earned over years of work designing buildings that stand the test of fascist regimes and war feels almost insurmountable. This is a story peeling back the layers of the American Dream, the reality behind the promise; it's hard not to feel, sometimes, as though we live in hopeful delusion regarding that journey to make our dreams into truth. It's a movie about the person made into the other, never acceptable to the dominant class outside of the immediate value they can provide. And it's all shot in breathtaking Vistavision film, capturing these grand moments in ways both timeless and timely. This is the kind of story we go to the theaters to experience: an epic that our HDTVs will, simply, never do justice.Closing Song: "Library" - Daniel Blumberg, THE BRUTALIST (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)---Follow The Movies on ⁠⁠Instagram ⁠⁠& ⁠⁠Letterboxd⁠⁠Financially support the podcast via the ⁠⁠tip jar!