The Brutalist
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Run Time: 3 hours 35 minutes
Stars: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce
Writers: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
Director: Brady Corbet
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
You could spend a lifetime at the movies and not encounter a performance as haunted and haunting as Adrien Brody’s in this epic story of a Holocaust survivor who arrives in postwar America with nothing to his name, save hopes of a second chance.
This idea of renewal — for our hero, for his adopted country, for the world at large — is the beating heart of this instant classic by director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux).
Brody stars as László Tóth, a Hungarian architect who in the 1930s made a name for himself designing Eastern European libraries in the brutalist manner, using massive amounts of poured concrete to create minimalist structures virtually void of decorative elements. There was no real-life László Tóth, and the character is not even based on an actual person — but try telling yourself that as Brody inhabits the man’s story over the film’s 3-½-hour length.
As portrayed in the film’s opening minutes, Tóth’s arrival in America is something akin to a baby being born. He emerges from the darkness of a steamship’s steerage compartment to glimpse his new mother, the Statue of Liberty, strikingly (and shockingly) shot here as if she is lying down.
Indeed, we are witnessing Tóth’s rebirth: Moments after this transformative moment, we experience his happiest, as a cousin in New York informs him his beloved wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), did not die in a concentration camp after their forced separation, but is very much alive back in Europe.
Working with his cousin, who runs a Philadelphia office furniture store, Tóth redesigns the library of a mercurial industrialist named Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) — a chance encounter that results in Van Buren commissioning Tóth to design and build a massive cultural center on the billionaire’s property in the suburbs.
Reunited with his wife — and inspired by her blind enthusiasm for his unique genius — Tóth throws himself into the project that will ultimately simultaneously make and break him (his stubborn addiction to heroin doesn’t help matters).
Present in virtually every scene, Brody breathes the rarified genius and tragic vulnerabilities of Tóth. As the tycoon who carelessly manipulates the lives of those he has ensnared in his iconoclastic orbit, Pearce remains infuriatingly charismatic. Jones isn’t asked to do much as the woman who knows Tóth best, but their mutual adoration grounds the central character, giving him something to live for beyond his own determination and demons.
A Complete Unknown
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 2 hours 21 minutes
Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Edward Norton
Writers: James Mangold, Jay Cocks, Elijah Wald
Director: James Mangold
Timothée Chalamet gives an A+ impersonation of Bob Dylan in cowriter/director James Mangold’s slavishly chronological account of the singer’s early career.
He’s certainly got Dylan’s impenetrable, dead-eye persona down, along with that singing voice that seems to have found a few extra feet of nasal cavity through which to travel before bursting forth into “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” But the point of the film — as the title suggests — seems to be that even the most insightful acting performance and nuanced script will never truly “get” Dylan.
Here he remains a cypher from the moment he emerges from a bus in New York City, right through his eventual morphing into a limo-riding superstar. Along the way he befriends his hero, Parkinson’s-stricken folk singer Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Guthrie’s spiritual successor, Pete Seeger (a pleasingly warm and fuzzy Edward Norton). Dylan takes up with an adoring Greenwich Village artist (Elle Fanning), cheats on her with an opportunistic Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), and finally, in a monumental middle finger to his adoring folk music fans (and Seeger, to whom he owes his entire young career), tears the roof off the staid Monterey Folk Festival in a screeching performance with his newly formed rock group, The Band.
Why does Dylan keep building up relationships and career paths only to casually and cruelly dismantle them? A Complete Unknown seems to be telling us “Because he wanted to.” That’s a hollow rationalization; one that cannot be filled in even by a half-dozen or so first-rate performances.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes
Stars: Ben Whitehead, Peter Kay, Lauren Patel
Writers: Mark Burton, Nick Park
Directors: Merlin Crossingham, Nick Park
Oscar-winning animator Nick Park’s fingerprints are all over his latest Wallace & Gromit film. Literally.
Working in the clay medium of which he has been the acknowledged master for decades, Park once told me, “I like to make sure the audience sees my fingerprints once in a while. It’s my way of reminding them a human made this.”
Park’s indelible appetite for analog fun is in full flower for this, his first Wallace & Gromit feature film since 2005’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. In fact, this movie is a direct sequel to The Wrong Trousers, the Oscar-winning 1990 W&G short that first introduced the rubber-limbed inventor Wallace (now voiced by Ben Whitehead, stepping in for the late Peter Sallis) and his wise, long-suffering, silent pup, Gromit.
This time, an evil penguin named Feathers McGraw (stay with me here) — the same guy Wallace and Gromit inadvertently exposed as a mastermind diamond thief back in 1990 — is on the loose. Vowing revenge, Feathers has re-programmed Wallace’s latest creation — a benign garden gnome robot — to make it a flame-throwing mechanical maniac.
On one level, I suppose, Vengeance Most Fowl could be seen as Park’s response to the dominance of digital creations over handmade art. But trying to apply higher meaning to any Wallace & Gromit outing seems somehow wrong. Just have fun with it. Park certainly is.
Better Man
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes
Stars: Robbie Williams, Jonno Davies
Writers: Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole, Michael Gracey
Director: Michael Gracey
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
I’d have paid good money to be a fly on the wall when the producers of this big-screen biography of British superstar Robbie Williams decided the singer/songwriter would be played not by an actor, but by a CGI-created chimpanzee (Williams provides the chimp’s voice, Jonno Davies did the motion capture acting to make a monkey out of him).
It’s an outrageous gamble, and although I spent the first half of the movie resisting the notion of a talking chimp climbing from the mean streets to TV’s Top of the Pops, I finally had to surrender: The dumb idea works surprisingly well. Even those unfamiliar with Williams’s music will have a good time swinging along with his simian self.
Babygirl
⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes
Stars: Nicole Kidman, Antonio Banderas, Harris Dickinson
Writer/Director: Haline Reijn
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Critics at last September’s Toronto International Film festival raved about Nicole Kidman’s brave performance in her sexiest movie since Eyes Wide Shut — but not so much about writer/director Haline Reijn’s by-the-numbers tale of a messy collision at the intersection of Lust and Love.
Kidman stars as a Manhattan CEO who, as wife of a dashing theater director (Antonio Banderas), is half of New York’s most glamorous power couple. But uh-oh: She’s having a romantic fling with a 20-something intern at her company (Triangle of Sadness’s Harris Dickinson). Filmmaker Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) doesn’t flinch from the trauma of shattered trust, but she’s also clearly having a good time dwelling on the allure of forbidden fruit.
Critically, she never fully answers the question on the mind of every woman I’ve met who’s seen the film: What is wrong with a woman who steps out with a callow college boy when she’s got an adoring version of Antonio Banderas waiting at home?
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