January 31-February 6, 2025

Hello, friends! 

This week, A Complete Unknown and Flow stick around for one last hurrah before we bid farewell to both on Thursday, February 6, and joining them are two of the most talked about films of the season: The Brutalist and The Room Next Door.  

Nominated by the Academy for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Editing, Score, and Production Design and directed by Brady Corbet (co-written by Corbet and his writer-director wife, Mona Fastvold), The Brutalist is a new American epic on multiple levels:  its themes, performances, and cinematography, its scope and its time frame, and yes, its length (3 hours, 35 minutes), all speak to its monumental reach.  

Even from its opening credits, the film announces itself as something of an old-school epic with a retro VistaVision logo and an opening musical overture, and I have to say, in terms of a truly cinematic experience that recalls Lawrence of Arabia or Once Upon a Time in America, The Brutalistdelivers. It is simply riveting from start to finish, and when the perfectly timed built-in intermission comes, I think audiences will be as ready to rush back to finish the second half as I was.

The story follows Jewish immigrant and Holocaust survivor László Tóth, played by a phenomenal Adrien Brody, who has fled to America to begin a new life with only so much as a few coins in his pocket. Back home, he was a renowned architect in the brutalist style, but in America, he is an impoverished nobody. His fortunes change when he encounters uber-wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (played by an absolutely fantastic Guy Pierce), whose ego is even bigger than his name, but who styles himself as a cultured man who recognizes artists when he sees them and who thinks Tóth has something to offer. 

What follows is an examination -- and exposure -- of the American Dream: its mythic weight and its brutal realities, its promise to make Somebodies of Nobodies, its promise of wealth and comfort and a good life, and its reality that capitalism and racism reign supreme, inevitably and eventually crushing all but perhaps the most powerful. Ultimately, in The Brutalist's America, where the most magnificent and beautiful American edifices seem to say, "we are the greatest nation in the world," it's the most vulnerable who are given voice to whisper back, "but it's our hearts and our bodies you broke to make them." 

There are many things about The Brutalist that I’m still mulling over -- I have wondered if its themes are actually as deep as their vehicle is grand (some critics say yes, some say no) -- but at least in terms of the clear intent to examine the fraught relationship between the American dream and wealth and power, this is a film for this particular moment in American history if there ever was one. 

I’ve been longing to play Pedro Almodovar’s latest film, and now, at last, it’s here: 

Starring the inimitable Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, with a delightful supporting role from John Turturro, The Room Next Door is Almodovar's first English language film, and it's wonderful. (The jury at Venice recognized the film by giving it the Golden Lion; Oscar voters, shamefully, ignored it. Boo!)

The film tells the story of Ingrid (Moore), a novelist, and Martha (Swinton), a war journalist, two friends who had been very close, but their lives drifted apart. When they meet again, Martha has learned she is dying, and she makes a strange request of Ingrid. It is a request I won't spoil, but it is one that sets the stage for the rest of the film, a film that beautifully explores what friendship means in the midst of mortality.  

Like so many of the best films about dying, it's also a film about life. Almodovar's signature style--particularly in his use of vibrant colors and in his unique mix of melodrama and comedy--underscores just how warm and wonderful life is, even when death is at the door.