31/45
Featured on The 7PM Project: December 10, 2024 episode
When visionary architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are forever changed by a mysterious, wealthy client. Filming lasted a total of 34 days between March 16 and May 5, 2023. It was shot in Budapest, Hungary and Carrara, Italy. Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.: When dogs get sick, they often bite the hand that feeds them – until someone, fortunately, euthanizes them.
The Brutalist is full of surprises
(2024). The characters are not who you expect, not in the finale of Scooby-Doo, but in the subtler, incremental ways in which real people reveal themselves: unfolding over time, in a new context, or as circumstances force them. Here the circumstances are post-World War II terror. Adrien Brody’s Laszlo, a Jewish architect who escaped the clutches of bloody Europe, arrives in the welcoming arms of America—or confronts them—in a frenetic opening sequence that literally evokes the birth of the Statue of Liberty.
What is the lesson?
His becomes a journey in which he perpetually navigates life’s array of horrors—existential, professional, familial, intimate—without taking his eye off the prize of great achievement and without assessing the value of that prize, to begin with. Is it the shameful discovery that his success was born not in spite of his trauma but because of it? Do we settle a debt to abuse? The forces of culture, country, power and those who wield it, in the construction of our brutal legacies (and homelands)?
But there’s nothing new
The film is charming, engaging and not at all boring (did you know it was long?). It feels like it’s based on an old novel – a mysterious tome that I’d love to know some of the details the film refuses to share. This aging man’s search for meaning becomes our own, too. And any greater understanding of Lazslo’s arrival, his families and kin.
The machinations, his country and uprooting, for better or worse, is for us to construct
From Alien: Romulus to Road House, take a look at some of our favorite posters from 2024.