Why the epic, enthralling Oscar favourite The Brutalist is like nothing you’ve seen before

There’s a good reason that the three-and-a-half-hour drama The Brutalist is favourite to win this year’s Best Picture Oscar – it’s like nothing you have seen before, writes Leigh Paatsch.

From an epic masterpiece to a Valentine’s Day special and an action romp sequel that’s better than it has any right to be, all the bases are covered at the movies this week.

Adrien Brody as architect Laszlo Toth in The Brutalist.

THE BRUTALIST (MA15+)

Director: Brady Corbet (Vox Lux)

Starring: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce

The fine art of building up (and up) to something

When you first study the imposing blueprints for The Brutalist, it is hard not to be intimidated – perhaps even daunted – by the sheer scale of this ambitious project.

Check out that marathon running time: all three hours and thirty-five minutes of it.

Fear not. The strategic placement of a 15-minute intermission midway through – at a juncture in the plot that take the movie to even greater heights – will be the refreshment station that guarantees you will stay the course with ease.

Then there is the enigmatically fascinating tale The Brutalist is electing to tell, that of a celebrated architect who devotes the best decades of his career to the design and construction of a single building.

The occupation of the obsessive protagonist, Laszlo Toth (played to Oscar-worthy perfection by Adrien Brody), is not the reason we are here. The movie could just easily have been about a plumber, a chef or a tailor.

Adrien Brody is mesmerising in The Brutalist.

No, the powerful truths told by The Brutalist (even though it is not a true story) will speak to anyone fascinated by the craft, passion, frustration and intuition that goes into making something. Making something work. Making something exist.

Further intensifying the disorienting spell cast by the movie is, quite aptly, its radical design. The Brutalist literally does not look, sound or feel like any motion picture that has come before it.

(Remarkably, director Brady Corbet shot the production’s muted, yet strikingly inviting visuals in VistaVision, a framing format that hasn’t been seen in cinemas for over six decades.)

Then there is the uniform excellence of the performances on display here. Brody anchors the lion’s share of the movie with a command of focus, range and control that is continually evolving.

His incendiary work truly catches alight with the arrival of a mesmerising Guy Pearce as Harrison Van Buren, the charismatic and conniving industrialist who commissions Toth to erect a spectacular hilltop monument to the memory of his late mother.

Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce play polar opposites.

The intricate verbal exchanges between these two polar opposites – along with a truly shocking scene where no words are spoken at all – constitutes acting of a rarefied calibre.

Other players that come and go throughout The Brutalist (most notably, Felicity Jones as Toth’s ailing, yet strong-willed wife) have equally impacting contributions to make.

While The Brutalist is not a movie that will please everyone, it is a movie that will mean the world to anyone it connects with.

As for The Brutalist’s relatively unknown writer-director Brady Corbet, this epic masterpiece heralds the arrival of a major filmmaking visionary with the potential to be another Christopher Nolan.

The Brutalist screens in special previews Friday through Sunday, and opens in general release next week.

Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh in the romantic drama We Live In Time.

WE LIVE IN TIME (M)

General release

With less than a month to go until Valentine’s Day, hopeless romantics will have their periscopes up, looking out for the kind of filmic fare containing all the joy, sorrow and lurrrvvve they can possibly handle. This British-produced weepie from the makers of Brooklyn is the one that should go straight to the top of the list.

An impeccably cast Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield play the happy (and unhappy) couple whose entire relationship will be charted in poignant and relatable detail here. Almut (Pugh) and Tobias (Garfield) are fated to meet in highly unlikely circumstances, and could one day be parted in bluntly tragic circumstances.

While we wait and hope for what will become of this perfectly matched pair, the movie unspools multiple timelines across the entirety of their union. The zigging and the zagging might have come off as a cheesy gimmick in other hands, but the innate credibility and authentic chemistry generated by Pugh and Garfield (liberated by not having to speak in American accents for a change) simply will not allow this to happen. Lovely, lingering stuff from go to whoa.

Gerard Butler as Big Nick O'Brien and O’Shea Jackson Jr as Donnie Wilson in Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. Photo Credictureit: Rico Torres

DEN OF THIEVES 2: PANTERA (M)

General release

If those highfalutin’ architectural antics promised by The Brutalist present as the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry, here’s how you can head in the opposite direction with both your head held high and your expectations held low. In actual fact, this punchy sequel to 2018’s guilty-pleasure action hit lands an uppercut above its predecessor in all the departments that matter.

A welcome result, really, considering the first Den of Thieves killed off almost all of its cast, save for its he-man hero Big Nick (Gerard Butler) and his no-bulldust nemesis Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr). This time around, these two sworn enemies must become reluctant frenemies for reasons not worth mentioning here. With Nick needing to cross over to the dark side from cop to crook, he joins Donnie in Europe for a high-stakes diamond heist that, quite frankly, shouldn’t stand a chance of happening.

Of course, the sillier the odds become, the better the movie gets. And the whole splashy, trashy spectacle is aided and abetted by some ripping action sequences and goofy support players.

Originally published as Why the epic, enthralling Oscar favourite The Brutalist is like nothing you’ve seen before