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Exclusive: U.S. outfit Moonstone Entertainment has boarded global sales rights to pan-European spy movie Espionage for Beginners, starring Benett Vilmányi (The Brutalist), Daphne Patakia (Benedetta), Thibault de Montalembert (All Quiet On The Western Front), Julie Gayet (Raw), Renan Pacheco (Emily In Paris) and Zsolt Nagy (Control).

The Hungarian-Belgian-Spanish co-production is being led by Hungarian producer István Major for his company FilmSquad, which has Russell Crowe-Rami Malek starrer Nuremberg upcoming — the film was just picked up by Sony Classics — and is known for co-producing movies including Brady Corbet’s The Childhood Of A Leader and Slingshot.

Inspired by a true story from the mid-1970s set in Cold War Europe, the film follows W. György, a Hungarian hotel receptionist whose life takes an unexpected turn as he becomes ensnared in a web of love, espionage, and self-discovery.

Currently in post, the French and Hungarian language film is directed by Viktor Oszkar Nagy...

Brady Corbet is proving himself to be one of the most popular voices in independent cinema. His new film, The Brutalist, has earned praise from critics and recognition from the Academy. The period drama showing a Hungarian architect in post-war America establishes Corbet as someone who takes financial risks to explore big themes.

With a rare career journey from acting in Thirteen and Mysterious Skin to the very unique directing debut on The Childhood of a Leader, Corbet’s vision has allowed him to receive various prestigious awards, like the Silver Lion of the Venice International Film Festival and Best Director Award at the Golden Globes, for The Brutalist.

Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist | Credit: A24

However, Corbet’s situation landed him in the headlines again and also raised some talks about his financial situation within the industry as he surprisingly stated that he got nothing out of The Brutalist.

Brady Corbet is reminding audiences just how special of a filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve is.

Corbet, whose feature “The Brutalist” is predicted to be a top contender at the 2025 Oscars, said during a visit to the Criterion Closet in the below video that Hansen-Løve is among the modern all-time greats. Writer/director/actor Corbet co-led Hansen-Løve’s 2014 autobiographical film “Eden” alongside fellow filmmaker Greta Gerwig.

“This one I actually have so I’m not going to take it,” Corbet said while holding a Blu-ray of Hansen-Løve’s 2021 film “Bergman Island.” He added, “I just want to call out Mia Hansen-Løve, one of my favorite directors that I worked with years ago on a film called ‘Eden.’ This is her film ‘Bergman Island.’ I encourage everyone to seek it out because I think she is one of our great contemporary treasures.”

Corbet further shared how much a trip to the Criterion Closet...

UK-based sales firm WestEnd Films has secured worldwide distribution rights to a catalogue of over 30 films, including The Brutalist director Brady Corbet’s feature debut The Childhood Of A Leader.

The back catalogue titles acquired by WestEnd include Jason Reitman’s Tully starring Charlize Theron; and Christopher Caldwell’s sci-fi Prospect starring Pedro Pascal.

Further additions to the WestEnd slate include Josh Trank’s Capone starring Tom Hardy as Al Capone; Craig Zisk’s The English Teacher with Julianne Moore; and Kriv Stenders’s Kill Me Three Times with Simon Pegg.

WestEnd will represent the titles for re-issue with new...

Quick LinksBrady Corbet's Ominous and Unsettling Historical DramaCorbet Continues His Sensational Hollywood Takeover With 'The Brutalist'

Brady Corbet is steadily establishing himself as one of the silver screen's most innovative and refreshing filmmakers, with the talented director taking audiences all across the world by storm with his powerful, critically acclaimed epic period drama The Brutalist.Before he was the recipient of the Best Direction Golden Globe and had his gripping picture nominated for a whopping 10 Academy Awards, Corbet had made his directorial debut back in 2015 with the foreboding historical drama The Childhood of a Leader.

In the deeply unsettling film, Corbet chronicles the early life of a future fascist leader in the immediate aftermath of World War I, as the young boy begins to exhibit violent and downright disturbing behavior while being raised by his American diplomat father and German mother in the French countryside. The Childhood of a Leader...

It's become a fun pub trivia act to be able to rattle off the legion of beloved performers who got their start on the big screen by acting in horror movies. It's less common, however, to learn about actors famous for their roles in horror films pivoting to directing and nabbing an Academy Award nomination for Best Director in the process. But that's precisely what happened with Brady Corbet, the director behind one of the frontrunners for Best Picture (at the time of writing) and a film that /Film's Chris Evangelista called "an overwhelming triumph" in his review, "The Brutalist."

Corbet, for those not familiar, made his feature directorial debut in 2015 with "The Childhood of a Leader." Loosely adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre's short story of the same name, the film centers on an American boy living in France with his authoritarian parents during the Treaty of Versailles and explores...

Brady Corbet is opening up about The Brutalist.

The 36-year-old director who helmed the film, which has received 10 nominations at the 2025 Oscars, says he made “zero dollars” from the acclaimed drama.

“I just directed three advertisements in Portugal… it’s the first time that I had made any money really in years,“ he admitted on the Wtf With Marc Maron podcast on Monday (February 17).

Keep reading to find out more…

He then said he “made zero dollars on the last two films we made.”

“Yes, actually zero,” he went on. “So we had to just live off of a paycheck from three years ago.”

His past directorial works include 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader and 2018’s Vox Lux.

The Brutalist recently won four awards at the 2025 BAFTAs and three awards at the 2025 Golden Globes, and he won Best Director prizes at both ceremonies.

“I’ve spoken to many filmmakers...

Brady Corbet, the BAFTA-winning filmmaker behind “The Brutalist,” has revealed that he and his wife and creative partner Mona Fastvold made “zero dollars” from their last two films, despite being a major Oscar contender this year. Speaking on “Wtf With Marc Maron,” Corbet described the financial strain that came with making the ambitious epic.

“This is the first time I’ve made any money in years,” Corbet said, explaining that his first real paycheck in a long time came from directing three advertisements in Portugal. “Both my partner and I made zero dollars on the last two films we made. Yes, actually zero. So we had to just live off of a paycheck from three years ago and and obviously, the timing during an awards campaign and travel every two or three days was less than ideal, but it was an opportunity that landed in my lap, and I jumped at it.

Editor’s note: Natalie Portman previously worked with Brady Corbet in his 2018 drama Vox Lux, in which she played Celeste, the survivor of a high school shooting who is ultimately transformed into a tough-talking pop star. Corbet shot his 3x Golden Globe winning and 10x Oscar nominated The Brutalist in 33 days, clocking in at 3 hours and 34 minutes. For Portman, Corbet excels in delivering stories that follow lone pioneers who are crusading against the corruption of society and those who wield power.

Portman in Corbet’s ‘Vox Lux’

I first saw Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist in a theater in Paris a few months ago. Having worked with Brady on Vox Lux, I thought I was prepared for the scale of his storytelling, but this film surpasses expectations.

Adrien Brody in ‘The Brutalist’

In all three of his features, including The Childhood of a Leader, the story of a petulant child...

Alexa, play “Greatest Day,” because Anora had one on Saturday. The Neon film regained pole position in the Best Picture Oscar race after taking both the Directors Guild of America Award for Sean Baker and the Producers Guild of America Award. The latter wasn’t a big surprise in an ostensibly splintered Best Picture race, but the former was a huge one. The Brutalist‘s Brady Corbet was the overwhelming favorite in the odds (and was dethroned from No. 1 by Baker in the Oscar odds on Monday), and not a single expert or editor foresaw Baker’s DGA upset coming. So how did he win?

Corbet was not as strong as he seemed to be

Even though Anora won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and held the No. 1 spot in the Best Picture Oscar odds throughout Phase 1, Baker was seen as a default Best Director pick...

Film Editing is often the below-the-line Oscar category most frequently linked to Best Picture, even more since the Academy committed to 10 Best Picture nominations.

All five of this year’s editing nominees also received Best Picture nominations, but only three have corresponding nominations for the film’s director. Four of this year’s five nominees received nominations from the American Cinema Editors (Ace) for the Ace Eddies, which have been delayed until March 14 due to the fires in Los Angeles. Noticeably missing from those nominations was The Brutalist, despite being nominated by the Academy editing branch.

According to the Gold Derby odds, Conclave would win this category, with The Brutalist close behind. However, this might be a more difficult category to pick. In the past, there have been unexpected winners, like Bohemian Rhapsody and The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo. In 2022, Coda was a rare Best Picture winner that wasn’t nominated for its editing.

Here’s the latest episode of The Filmmakers Podcast, part of the podcast roster here on Nerdly. If you haven’t heard the show yet, you can check out previous episodes on the official podcast site, whilst we’ll be featuring each and every new episode as it premieres.

For those unfamiliar with the series, The Filmmakers Podcast is a podcast about how to make films from micro-budget indie films to bigger-budget studio films and everything in between. Our hosts Giles Alderson, Dom Lenoir, Dan Richardson, Andrew Rodger and Cristian James talk about how to get films made, how to actually make them and how to try not to f… it up in their very humble opinion. Guests will come on and chat about their filmmaking experiences from directors, writers, producers and screenwriters, to actors, cinematographers and distributors.

The Filmmaker’s Podcast #437: The Brutalist writer-director Brady Corbet & production designer...

Mubi has unveiled their lineup for next month’s streaming offerings, featuring a selection of notable new releases, including Kazik Radwanski’s Matt & Mara, Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, Monica Sorelle’s Mountains, Marija Kavtardzé’s Slow, Monia Chokri’s The Nature of Love, and more. Additional highlights include films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Brady Corbet, Peter Weir, and more.

Recently naming Matt and Mara one of the best films of 2024, Blake Simons said, “Kazik Radwanski’s misty-eyed, mostly improvised tale of friends-not-quite-lovers excels at capturing intricacies of the unspoken. There’s a warming tenderness and quiet sadness to Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson’s restrained interactions. In the final moments, Mara places a crumpled receipt inside a book and returns it to its shelf. Sometimes that’s what a good film is: a leaf through our feelings. Matt and Mara is there on the shelf now, for when we feel like opening that book again.

RankFilm (origin)DistributorJan 24-26 grossTotalWeek 1 A Complete Unknown(US) Disney £1.7m £5.9m 2 2 Mufasa: The Lion King (US) Disney £1.4m £27.9m 6 3 Sonic The Hedgehog 3(US) Paramount £872,000 £23.3m 5 4 Flight Risk(US) Lionsgate £810,244 £810,244 1 5 The Brutalist(US-uk) Universal £703,617 £753,400 1

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.25

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist made a muscular start at the UK-Ireland box office with £703,617 from just 170 cinemas; as Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown wore the crown for a second weekend.

Disney’s A Complete Unknown added £1.7m – a fall of just 35%. James Mangold’s film now has £5.9m; a strong tail, boosted by awards attention, could see it chase...

Robert Pattinson Cinema Future Concerns (Photo Credit – Instagram)

Robert Pattinson has been reflecting on the uncertain future of cinema, especially after the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and strikes in Hollywood. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, he admitted that the state of the film industry left him worried and nearly turned off from acting altogether.

The cuntiest.#robertpattinson #ParisFashionWeek #Dior #myedits pic.twitter.com/KmMkIQniO5

— Bitch with wifi...

The director’s Adrien Brody-starring tale of a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor building a new future in the US moves him into the big league

Bold, confrontational and oversized in every way imaginable, Brady Corbet’s wildly ambitious three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic The Brutalist represents a near-perfect symbiosis of subject with film-making style. It’s a huge, uncompromising cinematic statement about the creation of a huge, uncompromising architectural statement. It’s a paean to purity of creative vision in the face of petty ignorance and tightened purse strings, of noble personal sacrifice in the name of art. The kinship between the misunderstood modernist architect who finds worlds of both opportunity and pain courtesy of the fickle whims of wealthy American philistines and Corbet, a former US child actor turned independent film-maker, is there for all who choose to see it.

The uncharitable may suggest that there’s a degree of...

Robert Pattinson admitted in an interview with Vanity Fair that he nearly convinced himself that cinema was dying and it was time to maybe stop acting as Hollywood struggled in the wake of the Covid pandemic and two major labor strikes. But then came a few movies like Oscar contender “The Brutalist,” directed by his friend Brady Corbet, that made him excited about the movies again. Corbet directed Pattinson in the filmmaker’s debut feature “The Childhood of a Leader.”

“It’s strange because the last few years for the film industry, starting with Covid and then the strikes, everyone was constantly saying cinema is dying. And quite convincingly,” Pattinson said. “I was literally almost turned off. It actually started to get a little worrying.”

“Then looking in the last few months, there’s this flurry of very ambitious movies,” he continued. “I feel like the stuff that’s going...

Citizen Kane. The Godfather. Once Upon A Time In America. There Will Be Blood. Towering monuments of moviemaking, all — and all namechecked in notices when Brady Corbet’s third picture, The Brutalist, won the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival. Is it possible for any modern movie, even an American epic of these proportions (and we don’t just mean the 215-minute running time), to stand firm in the shadows of such superstructures?

The Brutalist gives it a damn good go. An austere, novelistic, self-consciously important film that unfurls in a measured sprawl, it nonetheless exerts an iron grip. Yes, it’s shot in luxurious VistaVision and divided into chapters and features a 15-minute intermission. And sure, it mulls on the weighty themes of Jewish identity, immigration, privilege, culture-versus-commerce and the thin lines between inspiration and insanity, ambition and crushing egotism. But homework it ain’t.

With only two features under his belt, British musician Daniel Blumberg has already cemented his name in film history. After debuting scoring abilities on 2020’s The World to Come, the composer extraordinaire is back four years later with a monumental sophomore effort––one that reflects the work of a vetted master.

Blumberg’s 32-track, 82-minute score for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vast, varied, odyssey-inducing epic that subtly clues you into the film’s expression, the soul of its architect lead, and the dawning sense of hard-earned revelation that runs through the sweeping immigrant story.

With a Golden Globe nomination for the score already, multiple awards from critics circles, and an all-but-guaranteed Oscar nomination on the horizon, Blumberg sat down to talk with us about composing the score, the various and experimental approaches he took to recording, and the beauty of working with an assured, hyper-involved director like Corbet.

Brady Corbet's career has spanned many years. He has been involved in movies as an actor and has become a director, telling his own stories. He has also been a writer, and has been credited as a producer on several projects. In 2015, The Childhood of a Leader became his directorial debut. Since then, Corbet has expanded on his artistic experience and has showcased his unique vision in movies he has directed.

In the chilling opening moments of Bruno Ankovic’s “Celebration” (Proslava), Mijo (Bernard Tomić) is hiding away from the authorities. They are out for his blood amid the biting cold in the Autumn of 1945. Since this is the opening act, we are unaware of who Mijo is, where he comes from, and why the authorities are hunting him like rag dogs. The director’s intentions are pretty clear. He wants us to feel empathic towards Mijo before he slowly starts stripping away the said empathy for a more piercing look at what makes things lead to right-wing extremism.

Based on the novel “Celebration” by Damir Karakaš, the film is set in the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state formed by Nazi Germany in 1941. However, the non-linear narrative moves through four timelines – the autumn of 1945, the summer of 1933, the winter of 1926, and the spring of 1941. Mijo is the central character in all timelines; through him,...

Robert Pattinson is reuniting with director Brady Corbet exactly a decade after starring in Corbet’s first feature.

Pattinson, who presented the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Feature award to Corbet for “The Brutalist,” applauded the director for his indie, saying the film is a “true work of art” and an “astounding technical feat.” Pattinson previously had a small but important role in Corbet’s 2015 directorial debut “The Childhood of a Leader,” which debuted at the Venice Film Festival and won awards for Best Debut Feature and Best Director. Corbet co-wrote the screenplay with his partner Mona Fastvold; the duo also co-wrote “The Brutalist” together.

“Ten years ago, I was lucky enough to work with Brady on his first full-length feature, ‘The Childhood of a Leader.’ And I’m honored to be with you tonight to present the New York Film Critics Circle Best Film Award to Brady...

When Brady Corbet accepted the Golden Globe for best dramatic film on behalf of The Brutalist on Sunday, the 36-year-old American director made some off-the-cuff remarks about creative freedom.

“I just wanted to leave everyone with something to think about: Final-cut tiebreak goes to the director,” Corbet told the crowd, in what was his second speech of the night after winning best director earlier in the evening. “It’s sort of a controversial statement. It shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be controversial at all.”

“Final cut tirebreak” is the idea that if a director and a financier disagree over a creative choice on a film, the director’s vision should be the one to prevail. It’s a contractual privilege that A-list Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg enjoy, but that most filmmakers don’t have, especially in the U.S.

Corbet’s remarks on behalf of...

While preparing for his role as a titan of industry in Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” Guy Pearce had a specific image in his imagination. It was of a trophy hunter standing next to his prized kill, a lion or tiger or rhino, so proud of himself for having tamed nature.

“I was struck by the idea of recognizing something beautiful in the world and then feeling the need to destroy it,” Pearce said. “Or the need to control it as a way to feel less powerless. The psychology behind that is so fascinating and horrible to me.”

Pearce’s character in the film, the stately-named Harrison Lee Van Buren, is one of the year’s most intriguing creations. He’s not a trophy hunter in the literal sense, but a rich, immoral rogue who’s also dashing and cultured within the film’s 1950s Pennsylvania setting.

The patriarch of a family dynasty,...

How the team behind the Oscar contender managed to make a three-hour-plus film feel significantly shorter.

David Jancso is so close with filmmakers Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold that the editor has been by the couple’s side for several major milestones over the last decade, from cutting Corbet’s debut film The Childhood of a Leader and Fastvold’s 2020 feature The World to Come to witnessing the early days of Corbet and Fastvold’s daughter’s life in the pair’s Paris apartment.

“I understand what Brady wants, and his visionary approach to filmmaking is something that you just don’t forget,” Jancso tells Gold Derby.

Neither is The Brutalist, Corbet’s acclaimed new film and one of the season’s top awards contenders, with seven Golden Globe Awards nominations including Best Drama, Best Director for Corbet, and Best Screenplay for Corbet and Fastvold. Set in the aftermath of World War II,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Childhood of a Leader (Brady Corbet)

While Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist slowly starts to expand its theater count, you may be looking to catch up on his directorial debut. Tommaso Tocci said out of its Venice premiere in 2015, ” Before you picture a regular tale of domestic discomfort, however, it should be mentioned that Corbet is aiming for something far sharper and gutsier. Tightly packed in its 35mm, 1.66:1 aspect ratio, every element of the film is dialed up to eleven, with the aforementioned soundtrack making the person next to me curl up in the seat with her ears covered by the film’s unhinged final scene, or Dp Lol Crawley’s dark setups making the most of the crumbling chateau’s creepy atmosphere.

Imagine a film archivist scouring an underground vault in Burbank or a cave in Butte, Montana, and discovering a few dozen dusty film canisters tucked away in a corner. Reels of some long-lost project from Francis Ford Coppola, or Bernardo Bertolucci, or Michael Cimino circa the mid-1970s reside in these tins, bearing all the hallmarks of the big-canvas epics these auteurs made in their heyday. The performances are reminiscent of that decade’s brooding Method-ists and screen chameleons — think Pacino, De Niro, Cazale, Streep. The moody, inky cinematography appears...

The method dressing trend took a Wicked turn over these past few months as stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo delivered a high-profile parade of pink and green ensembles that went viral on Instagram or TikTok with every appearance. After those eye-catching looks, you would be forgiven for not clocking Felicity Jones’ recent appearance at the Los Angeles premiere of The Brutalist as being the newest example of the red carpet craze.

“This look is inspired by brutalist architecture,” Jones explained to The Hollywood Reporter of her black Proenza Schouler dress from the house’s Spring 2025 collection. The dress features a cut-out design up top and a car-wash-style skirt on the bottom with grommet details. “That was the idea with the dress, which has very strict rectangular forms and quite blunt cuts. It’s a dress that felt like it was an appropriate look for the film.”

Felicity Jones attends...

Plot: In the aftermath of WW2, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survived the holocaust, emigrates to America. While there, he gets a taste of the American dream from a wealthy benefactor (Guy Pearce), although success may carry a price too difficult to bear.

Review: It would be fair to say there hasn’t been a movie like The Brutalist in about forty years. One-time actor Brady Corbet, who emerged as a director following The Childhood of a Leader and the underrated Vox Lux, makes movies in the vein of David Lean, with this telling a deeply personal story on an epic scale the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time. Shooting in 70mm VistaVision, The Brutalist is a three-and-a-half hour masterwork (with an intermission) that will go a long way towards establishing Corbett as one of the great modern directors.

Indeed, The Brutalist...

A three-and-a-half-hour run time didn’t change the way The Brutalist cinematographer Lol Crawley worked. The low budget (under $10 million), the fact that he had worked with director Brady Corbet before (on 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader and 2018’s Vox Lux) and Corbet’s directorial approach all contributed to a concise way of shooting the film.

“I think filmmakers are like, ‘I didn’t know you could do that anymore: shoot on 35mm, have this thematically epic film — but also scale and length of run time with an intermission — for less than $10 million,” Crawley tells The Hollywood Reporter of the A24 release. “It didn’t feel dissimilar to the way that I have worked with Brady in the past, and there was never a discussion about the run time.”

The Brutalist — about Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who escapes the Holocaust and moves to the U.S.

Brady Corbet, director of the upcoming A24 film The Brutalist, is already looking ahead to his next project. Following The Brutalist, centering around an architect (Adrien Brody) fleeing post-war Europe in 1947 and pursuing the American Dream, Corbet will do something completely different. He revealed in a New Yorker profile that his next film, a horror-Western also centering around immigration, will “shake viewers.” According to The New Yorker:

The new project, which is set in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, will also deal with immigration, this time of the Chinese to California. Its style will be looser; genre-wise, it will draw on horror and Westerns.

Apparently, the seed of the idea came to the director when he hosted a Halloween watch party for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with his partner and collaborator, the filmmaker Mona Fastvold. Their 10-year-old daughter Ada and various friends were also in attendance.

Related The Brutalist Review:...

January 2025 could mark a bleak month for very specific reasons, but in that month one can watch a nicely curated collection of David Bowie’s best performances. Nearly a decade since he passed, the iconic actor (who had some other trades) is celebrated with The Man Who Fell to Earth, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Linguini Incident, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Basquiat. (Note: watch The Missing Pieces under Fire Walk with Me‘s Criterion edition for about three times as much Phillip Jeffries.) It’s a retrospective-heavy month: Nicole Kidman, Cameron Crowe, Ethan Hawke, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Paolo Sorrentino, and Sean Baker are given spotlights; the first and last bring with them To Die For and Take Out‘s Criterion Editions, joining Still Walking, Hunger, and A Face in the Crowd.

“Surveillance Cinema” brings Thx 1138, Body Double, Minority Report, and others, while “Love in Disguise” offers films by Lubitsch,...

We must be careful how we throw around the word "masterpiece," and yet it seems entirely appropriately for Brady Corbet's towering achievement "The Brutalist." Years in the making, Corbert's sprawling, nearly four-hour epic is cut from the same cloth (or perhaps I should say chiseled from the same stone) as great masterpieces like "Citizen Kane," "The Godfather," and more recently, "There Will Be Blood." And like those three movies, "The Brutalist" is a distinctly American masterpiece; a story that reflects the triumphs and horrors of the ethereal thing we call "The American Experience." These are stories of great men bursting with wild, potentially dangerous ambition and how they found a way to encase that ambition in the still-developing America of the past, an ever-changing, ever-growing thing impossible to pin down. 

All of Corbert's films are like mock history lessons; biopics for people who never existed, but feel real. His feature debut,...

It’s pretty crazy to think that “The Brutalist” marks just the third film in the filmography of director Brady Corbet. The growth he’s shown from “The Childhood of a Leader” to “Vox Lux” to this year’s “The Brutalist” is quite amazing. It makes you wonder what he might have up his sleeve next.

Read More: The 20 Best Films Of 2024

According to a new profile of Brady Corbet in The New Yorker, what the filmmaker has next is apparently a period film that draws from horror and Western genres.

Continue reading ‘The Brutalist’ Filmmaker Brady Corbet’s Next Film Is Another Immigration Story With Horror & Western Moods at The Playlist.

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Venice Film Festival. A24 will release “The Brutalist” in select theaters on Friday, December 20.

It might seem too easy to observe that Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” — a 215-minute slab of a film that spans 30 years in the life of Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who flees to America in the hopes of building a better future — has been constructed to embody the aesthetics of its title character. Shot in VistaVision and projected on 300lbs.’ worth of 70mm film stock, Corbet’s epic draws a perfectly self-evident connection between the weight of its raw material and that of the concrete monolith Tóth creates over the course of the story, and the same could be said of its minimalistic framing, its bone-deep aversion to nostalgia, and, most of all, the movie’s efforts to reveal the soul...

In the months leading up to the production of The Brutalist, writer-director Brady Corbet texted his leading actor, Adrien Brody, from Italy, where the filmmaker was struggling to find a location he had envisioned. In a key sequence in the film, Brody, as Jewish Hungarian refugee architect László Toth, travels with his wealthy patron, played by Guy Pearce, to obtain white marble from quarries carved into the mountains of Carrara, Italy. Corbet and his co-writer and romantic partner, Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold, had written the dramatic landscape — where Michelangelo got his marble — into their 168-page script to supply an emotionally resonant backdrop for a dark turning point in the story, but Corbet couldn’t locate a spot for filming until Brody intervened. “I texted him back, ‘I got you,’ ” Brody says. “And I called a friend of mine who actually owns the quarry.” In a few hours, Corbet sent Brody...

Update: “The Brutalist” is coming to Imax. Tickets for early-access screenings in New York and Los Angeles on Dec. 18 are available for purchase. The film will then expand to Imax screens across the U.S. throughout January.

Previously: A24 has announced the first 70mm screenings of “The Brutalist,” which launches in the specialty format on Dec. 19 in New York City and Los Angeles.

Tickets are available for purchase for the Village East Cinemas in New York and the Vista Theatre in L.A. Additional cities and dates will be announced soon.

“The Brutalist,” a three-plus-hour epic directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody, was filmed in VistaVision, a high-resolution format with a wider field of view, allowing for enhanced clarity when projected in 70mm. The movie carries four miles of celluloid film, which weighs a whopping 259 pounds.

Attendees of the 70mm engagements will receive a collectible brochure and postcard...

The Brutalist is one of the most talked about films this year. It has caused a lot of chatter for a movie that is yet to be released. The decades-spanning drama centered on architecture and immigration is set in post-war America. It chronicles the life of László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States. He relentlessly struggles to succeed professionally as an architect, until meeting a wealthy client alters his life forever.

Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce in The Brutalist | Credits: Universal Pictures

The Brutalist will likely sweep all the awards this awards season. The film, a combination of the best talents in the industry, has emerged as one of the finest pieces of cinema this year. With unanimously positive critical comments and dominating nominations with the approaching awards season, The Brutalist has established itself as one of the best films being released this year. And if...

Guy Pearce is having a moment — not that he ever left. “It feels funny when people kind of go: ‘Wow, so you’re back,'” he tells Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast. “And I’m like ‘Where did I go? I didn’t go anywhere?”

With a career spanning three decades, Pearce has always been a highly respected character actor, equally convincing as the clean-cut, ambitious detective in “L.A. Confidential” (1997) or the amnesiac unraveling his own mystery in “Memento” (2001). Now, he’s drawing attention once again with a complex and haunting performance in Brady Corbet’s period epic, “The Brutalist.”

But for Pearce, success has always hinged on the material. “I always find the best work I do usually comes when the writing’s really good,” Pearce says during our conversation. “You feel inspired, and you just dance on top of what the writer has created. When the script is there,...

There are many different ways to measure a terrific film awards season.

Last year, “Barbenheimer” put two billion-dollar blockbusters at the center of the awards chatter. “Barbie” settled for an Oscar and a “box office achievement” Golden Globe, while “Oppenheimer” fulfilled its promise as the first (much-needed) awards season megahit and awards juggernaut in many years. Besides sweeping up multiple Oscars, Christopher Nolan’s opus also garnered both Oscar and Golden Globe best picture wins.

Twenty-five years ago, the Oscar race was a Weinstein-era slugfest for best picture, with the Harvey-handled “Shakespeare in Love” keeping Steven Spielberg’s WWII epic “Saving Private Ryan” out of the top Oscar perch, while both films took home Golden Globe best picture trophies. This year has been knocked by some critics and some awards season pundits as perhaps not one for the history books, with a less than stellar lineup of key contenders.

“The Brutalist” cinematographer Lol Crawley will be honored with the Robby Müller Award at the 54th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which runs Jan. 30 – Feb. 9.

The award acknowledges the “artistry of an exceptional image maker,” and is given in collaboration with the Netherlands Society of Cinematographers and Andrea Müller-Schirmer, the wife of the late Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller.

The award will be accompanied by a talk from Crawley during the festival, as well as a screening of “The Brutalist,” which marks the Dutch premiere of the film.

The jury for this year’s Robby Müller Award noted: “Lol Crawley’s camera is dedicated to the story and characters in a way that is both humble and ardent. It forms a close, dynamic relationship with them. His sensual cinematography embraces the environment as unpredictable and fluid and aims to align with its flow rather than confine it to a predefined frame.

There’s a new frontrunner in Gold Derby’s Oscar odds for Best Director: Brady Corbet for “The Brutalist.”

The American filmmaker has broken his tie with Sean Baker (“Anora”) to claim the No. 1 position on our chart for the upcoming 2025 Oscars. Note that it’s still quite early in this awards season, and things could keep changing as our experts, editors, and users continue to update their predictions.

The A24 fictional drama centers around Adrien Brody‘s character László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States in the 1940s in the hopes of achieving the American Dream. While László is waiting for his wife (Felicity Jones) to join him, he starts working with his cousin (Alessandro Nivola) at a furniture store, and he eventually comes into contact with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce).

This would be Corbet’s first career Oscar nomination, after...

Lol Crawley, Dp on Brady Corbet’s acclaimed Oscar contender The Brutalist, will receive the 2025 Robby Müller Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in January.

The honor, named for the late legendary Dutch cinematographer of Paris, Texas, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Mystery Train, is presented annually to an “an image maker who has created an authentic, credible and emotionally striking visual language.”

Crawley will attend IFFR in January to give a talk on his work as well as present a screening of The Brutalist, which will celebrate its Dutch premiere at the festival.

Crawley, a BAFTA and Independent Spirt Award nominee, lensed Corbet’s previous features, Vox Lux (2018) and The Childhood of a Leader (2015), and is known for his work on such features as Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015), Antonio Campos’ The Devil All The Time (2020), and Noah Baumbach’s White Noise (2022).

The Brutalist...

Robert Pattinson has come quite far since his role in the Twilight movies, which, to be fair, was one of his worst acting jobs. Throughout the four films, Pattinson’s performance progressively worsened. However, he did not have much to go on with the vampire character. Pattinson proved to be a performer in films like The Childhood of a Leader, Good Time, and The Lighthouse.

Robert Pattinson will play Mickey Barnes in Mickey 17 | Credits: Warner Bros. Pictures

Pattinson was not a fan-favorite when he was cast in the role of Batman. However, he surprised fans with his darker take on the character, something Matt Reeves also got credit for. The film has now set a major benchmark that James Gunn will have to surpass with his Dcu film, The Brave and the Bold. However, Pattinson’s upcoming projects seem to have more promise than his role as the Dark Knight.

In this line of work (writing about movies), hyperbole and festival hype can be a real problem. Sometimes, a film will play a festival to rapturous acclaim, only to then finally be released with a shrug. It's not even that these sorts of films end up being bad, it's just that it's very hard to live up to all that hype. I try very hard to tread carefully with these sorts of things — I don't want to oversell something. But let me tell you this: when it comes to Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist," believe the hype. Corbet's latest movie premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it was met with almost universal acclaim. It's played other festivals since then, and again and again, viewers are blown away. Having seen the film for myself, I can attest to its strengths: this movie is the real deal, folks. In fact,...

Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” has already stunned at Venice. Now, the epic drama is unfurling its awards campaign with the first trailer.

“The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor and architect who arrives in America to build a massive modern community center. The film spans 30 years in the life of Brody’s László, ranging from his project with his employer (Guy Pearce) to his rocky marriage with his wife (Felicity Jones).

The cast also includes Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Raffey Cassidy, and Stacy Martin.

“The Brutalist” is writer/director Corbet’s third film after “The Childhood of a Leader” (2015) and “Vox Lux” (2018); he has also acted in films such as “Melancholia,” “Mysterious Skin,” and “Thirteen.” Mona Fastvold co-wrote the script for “The Brutalist,” with Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera comparing the feature to King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of “The Fountainhead.

A brutal Oscar season is ahead…in a good way.

As the Oscar race heats up, Hollywood is bracing for an intense, wide-open awards season. After its whirlwind tour through the Venice, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals, A24’s newly acquired historical epic “The Brutalist” has emerged as a potential heavyweight in this year’s Academy Awards lineup. Starring Adrien Brody in a career-redefining role as a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and journeys to the U.S., the film screened in front of an influential audience at CAA on Sunday night. The room was filled with industry professionals, journalists, and Oscar winners like Cord Jefferson (“American Fiction”). After the screening, the film’s director, Brady Corbet, and co-writer Mona Fastvold participated in a post-screening Q&a session, giving the audience insight into the seven-year odyssey to bring this project to life.

“The Brutalist” follows 30 years in...

Indie filmmaker Brady Corbet may have had a shockingly small budget for “The Brutalist,” but the writer/director is explaining why more funding would have been even more brutal.

Period piece “The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor and architect who arrives in America to build a massive modern community center. Guy Pearce plays László’s employer, with Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Raffey Cassidy, and Stacy Martin co-starring. The film spans 30 years in the life of Brody’s László.

“The Brutalist” was filmed in Budapest and Tuscany in Spring 2023 after Covid delays on a budget of less than $10 million. The feature debuted at the Venice Film Festival, with North American distributor A24 positioning the drama as an Oscar contender. Focus Features has the international distribution rights.

Corbet told Variety that he spent seven years developing “The Brutalist,” which became a 215-minute...

Writer-director Brady Corbet doesn’t see much difference between constructing a skyscraper and making a movie.

“There are so many similarities,” says Corbet, whose new film “The Brutalist,” which dramatizes the concessions architects are forced to accept, is also an allegory of Hollywood. “We’re usually working for a client. The infrastructure involved is enormous. The number of people required to run these operations is immense, and there are so many compromises you have to make. There aren’t many art forms with so many cooks in the kitchen.”

“The Brutalist” is more concerned with constructing monuments than making movies, but its story seems to be informed by Corbet’s personal experiences with art and commerce. It centers on László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect, who arrives in America after being interned at Buchenwald. His path intersects with that of a preening industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce...

“The Brutalist” had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 1, and ever since it has been flying high in our Oscar odds based on the combined predictions of Gold Derby users. The film now ranks among the top 10 likely contenders for Best Picture, and it looks like more nominations than that could be in the offing. Make or update your Oscar predictions here.

See‘The Room Next Door’: From Golden Lion at Venice to golden Oscars?

The epic film chronicles the life of a Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who travels to America for a better life. The film earned raves, with critics describing the film as “monumental,” “classic” and “a major work of art.” Coming off that successful debut, the film ranks ninth on our Best Picture chart with 18/1 odds as of September 9. That’s up from a week earlier, September...