A masterpiece—even better than I'd ed it. Gains a lot from the use of dislocation as a tactic: this is not a film of vignettes so much as one of fragments, and each portion of time and space offers the pleasures of estrangement. For me, that's the best kind of realism: the kind that depicts our world with enough creativity to balance the work between physicality and abstraction.
Made with the utmost economy, yet almost orgiastic in its delights. Those include graceful compositions, cut together with a fluidity that would be remarkable at any point in film history, and is especially laudable for coming so soon after the advent of sound; dramatic tension that is established with the utmost delicacy and never flags for a moment; dialogue trimmed to the point of essentials even when it dips into counterpoint and repetition; performances that are just restrained enough to…
I don't take a lot of pleasure in deflating artistic ambition when there's no big moral objection I have to the movie in question. I've spit my share of contempt at the screen over the years, but with the films I really loathe—the shock-value "indie" movies of the 90s and aughts, the boombox blockbusters of today—there's something ideological that offends me. That's not really the case with The Brutalist, which no one would deny is a wildly ambitious work of…
A masterpiece--I'd put it next to Psycho, Rio Bravo and Citizen Kane as one of the greatest achievements in Classical Hwd cinema. I hadn't seen it in probably a decade, and this time was like the scales falling from my eyes. The relationship between image and idea is so strong: the compositions and camera placement whisper words in our ears, many of them quite disturbing to hear. Ford's direction is as limpid as one can get within the confines of…
