A24’s award-winning epic movie THE BRUTALIST just made its HBO debut on Saturday, May 17 at 8:00 pm and on Max the day prior. It is a 3-hour and 24-minute epic directed/produced by Brady Corbet. He last directed 2018’s Vox Lux with Natalie Portman & Jude Law and had acting experience with movies/shows including The Sleepwalker and HBO’s OLIVE KITTERIDGE. THE BRUTALIST is written by Corbet and longtime co-writer Mona Fastvold.
The movie is about the life of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, who immigrates to the United States post-war to start anew. From the New York Harbor, he makes it to Philadelphia and to his cousin Attila Miller’s (Alessandro Nivola) home, where he learns that his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are still alive but stuck in Europe. Will Tóth’s American Dream include reuniting with them? After some difficult years, he is hired as an architect by Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), and in gratitude for using his talents for Van Buren’s benefit, he arranges to be reunited with his wife & niece.
Needless to say, Tóth’s life is a struggle facing prejudice and a fickle employer. The detailed period piece no doubt draws people into his life, and the cinematography must be perfect, making you feel you are right there. A cast of hundreds, it seems, makes the story possible too. There are far too many plot lines and 
characters to explain it all here. It is full of themes as well. It talks of art and design, the American Dream and capitalism, immigration and the bigotry that goes with it.
Accolades abound for this work. It sets Corbin up nicely for future Hollywood endeavors going forward. Upon its premiere at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, the movie won five awards, including the top honor. It was subsequently nominated for nine awards at the 30th Critics’ Choice Awards, ten awards at the 97th Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It ultimately won three of these, which were Best Cinematography (Lol Crawley), Best Score (Daniel Blumberg), and Best Lead Actor (Adrien Brody), to just name a few.
It is a movie that fits right up the Academy’s alley, even though there was a bit of debate about AI usage in the film. The AI tool ReSpeecher was employed in order to improve the authenticity of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian dialogue. Despite that, though, reviews were solid for the epic.
Find THE BRUTALIST across HBO’s channels and on Max now.
