The Brutalist

Just when I thought Nosferatu was making its case for the best looking film of 2024, fucking kaboom, this takes the cake. Truly blown away by The Brutalist, in all aspects. Adrien Brody unsurprisingly lives up to the buzz and drops debatably the best male performance of the year. Guy Pierce with a complete comeback performance that has me excited for what he’s in next. Felicity Jones makes the most of her somewhat limited screen time. And all other small performances were great as well. A beautifully written story, that’s sequencing and pacing makes its 3 and a half hour run time digestible, and makes it flow as smoothly as something like Killers Of The Flower Moon. But the writing really shines in the film’s dialogue, which is some of the finest of the decade thus far, which results in some of the most believable and realistic conversations of the year, that also happen to be incredible intelligent and at times humorous. The real strong suit of the film however, is the masterful direction of Brady Corbet, which truly brought the film to life, and made a film of this scale and magnitude digestible but still intimidating. It’s also worth touching on once more that this is easily one of the most beautiful films of the decade, with every third shot making my audibly whisper wow under my breath, and the film also features some of the most beautiful and interesting locations I’ve seen in a while. Some smaller things: the score was also fantastic, especially that opening theme to kick off the film, and the little credits stylization, especially the opening credits, were very cool and most definitely up my alley. Truly a masterpiece and an achievement.