This article appeared in the September 13, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024)

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist ends in Venice, at the 1980 Biennale Architettura, where the film’s fictional protagonist, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), is being honored for his lifetime achievements in modernist architecture. Forty-four years later, at the 2024 Biennale Cinema—aka the Venice International Film Festival—The Brutalist premiered to an eager press-and-industry corps that seemed rapt from its opening frame. Whether it was because the movie was being screened in 70mm (it’s the first American film since 1961 to be shot entirely in VistaVision, a large-gauge film format developed by Paramount in 1954 as something of an in-house answer to the anamorphic CinemaScope process), or due to its imposing runtime (215 minutes, complete with overture, intermission, and epilogue), there was clearly something in the air as Corbet’s years-in-the-making passion project unfurled on the Lido di Venezia. Indeed, while history has taught critics (however futilely) to be wary of the pitfalls of overpraising anticipated films at major festivals, there’s no denying The Brutalist’s scope, intelligence, and sheer go-for-broke ambition, which at the very least set it apart in a competition in which nearly every other hotly tipped title (Pablo Larraín’s Maria, Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer) fell substantially short in one or more of those categories. Criticize Corbet’s self-conscious artistry—or even the chutzpah it takes for a 36-year-old former actor to endeavor, with his third feature, to make a great American epic—all you want, but I’ll be damned if this movie doesn’t make good on that ambition at nearly every turn, consistently flirting with greatness across its decades-spanning narrative.

The Brutalist begins in Budapest, in the waning days of World War II, before shifting to Tóth’s arrival by boat at Ellis Island, and his subsequent journey to Pennsylvania. There, the Bauhaus-trained Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor takes up with his furniture-maker cousin (Alessandro Nivola), who quickly gets them a gig remodeling the library of a local business tycoon named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Begrudgingly impressed with Tóth’s work, Van Buren soon enlists him for an even grander project: the construction of a vast, multipurpose cultural center in posh Doylestown. Along with Tóth’s efforts to reunite with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy)—both of whom were forcibly separated from him during the war—the bulk of the film centers on the construction of this building, which unearths not only stylistic and philosophical differences between the visionary architect and his American colleagues, but also their deep-seated prejudices against his Jewishness.

Like Corbet’s first two features, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018), The Brutalist is mounted with a confidence arguably matched, among American filmmakers, only by Paul Thomas Anderson, whose period parables There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) are this film’s closest contemporary counterparts. (Otherwise, Corbet seems most indebted to European art cinema, past and present, hinted at here through the casting of Isaach de Bankolé and Ariane Labed in supporting roles.) What separates The Brutalist—which, despite the occasional showstopping flourish, is a proudly classical film—from Corbet’s previous work is that he’s seemingly found the perfect form for his historically minded material. Where The Childhood of a Leader’s rigorous style feels slightly fussy and Vox Lux’s wild mix of tones comes across (for some) as campy, Corbet, working again with his partner and co-writer Mona Fastvold, lets the story of The Brutalist—and the actors called upon to bring its inner workings to life—do the work his other films took great pains to realize through imposing set pieces and bravura cinematography. If this approach makes the new film more staid and stately than those past works, it’s also several times more mature, the mark of an artist who’s truly come into his own.

Appropriately, Corbet won the Best Director prize from the festival’s Isabelle Huppert–led jury, which also threw a bit of a curveball (at least judging from on-the-ground scuttlebutt) by awarding Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, The Room Next Door, the Golden Lion—the first top prize the veteran Spanish director has ever received from a major festival. As someone who’s had little time for most of Almodóvar’s recent work, I was pleasantly surprised by this modest but beautifully composed and deeply moving adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, about a cancer-stricken journalist (Tilda Swinton) who invites her novelist friend (Julianne Moore) to the Catskills to keep her company while she ends her life on her own terms. The competition’s other worthwhile offerings included two long-awaited titles: Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, a feverish tale of a medieval English village reckoning with the forces of modernity, marking the Greek filmmaker’s first feature in nine years; and Stranger Eyes, Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua’s belated follow-up to his Locarno-winning A Land Imagined (2018).

Tucked away at the very end of the festival, Yeo’s third fiction feature expands on the filmmaker’s interest in technology and the ways in which it can shape or even upend one’s relationship with reality. Following the disappearance of their baby daughter, a young couple (Wu Chien-ho and Anicca Panna) begin to receive a series of DVDs featuring footage of their daily life, which they quickly trace back to their neighbor (Lee Kang-sheng, in another recent role apart from his most frequent and storied collaborator, Tsai Ming-liang). But like much else in this intricately plotted surveillance drama—which, at its best, resembles ’90s-era Atom Egoyan in look and feel—the setup is essentially a pretext to explore larger ideas related to identity, trauma, and human connection in a world overrun by screens and social networks. With its seductive aesthetic and subtly shifting temporal logic, the film beguiles as much as it discombobulates. It’s the Venice title most likely to reward repeat viewings.

Per usual, the festival’s parallel sections featured many of the more idiosyncratic or niche auteur works. Along with Harmony Korine’s first-person shooter experiment Baby Invasion—a film that, quality aside, represents a logical extension of the director’s use of AI and various synaesthetic imaging technologies in 2023’s Aggro Dr1ft (I enjoyed it; others’ mileage may vary)—there were two titles that stood out for their creativity as much as their content: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud and Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements. In Kurosawa’s typically unsettling take on the techno-thriller, a brash young man (Masaki Suda) working as an online reseller of shady consumer goods is confronted by his victims after they band together to seek revenge. The punishment doesn’t necessarily fit the crime, but that’s entirely the point: just as the internet acted as a ghostly portal between realities in Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001), here the web’s more mundane uses stoke disturbances that hold similarly grave ramifications. That Kurosawa has likened the online mob mentality to the warmongering mindset currently gripping the world should be evidence enough that he has more on his mind in this “action film”—as he describes it—than initially meets the eye.

Perry, too, has made more than a mere music documentary with Pavements, a prismatic portrait of the ’90s indie-rock phenomenon Pavement that takes an aptly shape-shifting approach to the era’s most endearingly inscrutable band. Incorporating footage from rehearsals for an off-Broadway Pavement jukebox musical; scenes from a fake (and purposefully lame) biopic about the group, starring Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman; and actual documentary and archival footage about the band’s rise, fall, and resurrection, the film is a fundamentally odd and uneven endeavor, as interesting and ingratiating as it is occasionally irritating—not unlike Pavement itself. While Perry and I are almost the exact same age, I can’t say, based on this film, that I share his relationship with Pavement’s music—nor can I stomach musical theater to the extent that he apparently can. But that’s okay: as with many generation-defining bands, discovering Pavement’s music feels like being let in on the world’s biggest secret. It’s only right that a film about them should feel entirely personal.

Some of the most unforgettable images of this year’s festival came from documentaries about cinema. In Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, rare archival material from Leni Riefenstahl’s estate (photos, letters, home movies, telephone recordings) trace a complex and fascinating path through the career of a director whose work with Hitler and the Third Reich on films such as Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) dominated the remainder of her life. (Until her death in 2003, she adamantly denied having any greater ties with Hitler or Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s chief propagandist, or any knowledge of the death camps.) Interviews with Riefenstahl about the technical aspects of her work, as well as footage from various talk shows, reveal the true weight of cinema’s capacity to influence and intoxicate beyond reason. In one troubling TV appearance from 1976, Elfriede Kretschmer, a former member of the workers’ anti-Nazi resistance movement, accuses Riefenstahl of making “Pied Piper films,” to which she objects before getting teary-eyed over the alleged shock she felt when finally learning of the atrocities being committed—an emotional display greeted with supportive applause by the German audience.

It’s possible that Jerry Lewis had Riefenstahl on his mind when making The Day the Clown Cried, the American comedian’s notoriously unfinished drama from 1972 about a former clown ordered to load Jewish children onto trains bound for Auschwitz, who later finds himself, in Pied Piper–like fashion, leading them to their deaths. It’s a comparison Lewis made a number of times over the years, including in an interview conducted shortly before his 2017 death for From Darkness to Light, a documentary about the making of The Day the Clown Cried. Along with its pro forma array of talking heads and contextual clips, the doc features extended scenes from a movie that until recently has been all but hidden from view. (Last month, the five hours of footage shot for the movie became available to the public through the Library of Congress, to which Lewis donated the material in 2015.) While most of the interview subjects—including comedian Harry Shearer, one of the few people to have seen a rough cut of the film—talk about the project in negative or skeptical terms, the sequences included in From Darkness to Light, which was co-directed by Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler, are striking and frequently revelatory—particularly the intimate scenes with Harriet Andersson, who plays the clown’s wife, and quiet moments between Lewis and the children in the camp that are almost unbearably moving. While Lewis himself was never satisfied with the film, which was abandoned by its producer and left in copyright purgatory for decades, there’s enough artistry and integrity in the footage now available to suggest that the project’s reputation could at least be salvaged. If nothing else, its images are the ones from Venice that are sure to haunt me most.

Jordan Cronk is a film critic and the founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series in Los Angeles. In addition to Film Comment, he is a regular contributor to Artforum, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, Sight and Sound, and more. He is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.