Oscar favourite towers over rivals as a colossal creation

Adrien Brody shines in 'The Brutalist', an exploration of America through the eyes of an architect, plus Soderbergh's 'Presence' is a haunting drama,

- Clarisse Loughrey

"Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?" says the architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody). He's a brutalist - the one described by the title of Brady Corbet’s new film, which has been nominated for 10 Oscars. His is an architectural language of simplicity and honesty. Laszlo, trained at the Bauhaus art school and once renowned in his field, is a Jewish survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, whose arrival to America has rendered him anonymous once more. He learns, over time, that many of his creations withstood the war; their constructions have continued to speak for him even in his absence.

What’s been heavily advertised – The Brutalist’s 215-minute running time, including a built-in, 15-minute interval; the use of the high-resolution, widescreen VistaVision format, which hasn’t been deployed for a full American feature since 1963; and the distribution of the film on 70mm prints – isn’t simply the fetishistic marker of an old school auteurist. Because there is no better description of The Brutalist than of its construction.

It’s not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There’s such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity – which, coupled with the same fierce cynicism of Corbet’s previous films, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and his pop star psychodrama Vox Lux (2018), turns a traditional historical epic into an existentially disturbing monster movie. The monster in question, of course, is America.