Something to watch tonight: Monday 10 November

The Brutalist (Corbet, 2024)

Editor’s note

Well, last week turned out to be a bru­tal­ist in its own right. I had a tooth extrac­tion sched­uled for Friday and was pre­scribed some anti­bi­ot­ics in advance of that and had a sud­den and viol­ent reac­tion to those on Wednesday night. It’s been all about recov­ery since then.

Over the next few days we’ll be get­ting back up to speed around these parts with a big ‘new releases’ catch-up sched­uled for tomorrow.

Any and all incon­veni­ences are regretted.

Thanks for all the pos­it­ive feed­back about At the Movies, by the way. It means a lot.

It’s a good time to have shares in VistaVision, the giant film format that mod­ern auteurs are favour­ing for their big screen epics. Jorgos lanthi­mos and cine­ma­to­graph­er Robbie Ryan shot last week’s Bugonia in the format, as did Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Bauman for One Battle After Another, but the film that kicked off the trend was Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist last year.

I was review­ing for RNZ At the Summer Movies at the time and was very moved by it:

It takes more than just length for a film to become an epic but at 215 minutes, plus a fifteen-minute inter­val, The Brutalist meets that first require­ment. It also needs to be about some­thing great­er than just the domest­ic trav­ails of its char­ac­ters and it ticks that box, too.

This is a film about America and the prom­ises made and broken by cap­it­al­ism. But it’s also about some­thing else, some­thing I won’t reveal here because it comes in an epi­logue at the end. It hits you like a gut punch and forces you to think again about everything you have just seen – even to the extent of want­ing to rewatch the film imme­di­ately, from the beginning.

It’s not being clev­er for clever’s sake, it’s a genu­inely bril­liant and power­ful film about trauma and the inad­equacy of recov­ery, the impossib­il­ity of heal­ing and the neces­sity of survival.

(Listen or read at RNZ.)

Also reviewed in that sum­mer sum­mary from 3 February this year: Mark Walhberg mis­fire Flight Risk, excel­lent loc­al doc­u­ment­ary The Haka Party Incident, oper­at­ic biop­ic Maria (now Netflix), clev­er hor­ror Companion and the laboured wed­ding com­edy You’re Cordially Invited (Prime).

Where to watch The Brutalist

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix

Australia: Streaming on Netflix, FoxtelNow and Binge

Canada: Streaming on Prime Video

Ireland and UK: Streaming on Sky

India: Streaming on Hotstar

USA: Streaming on HBO Max