215 min | R | January 24, 2025 | A24
Brady Corbet makes a three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute epic about architecture, ambition, and the cost of artistic vision in America. Every minute earns its place.
Epics are dead. Studios do not make them anymore unless they involve superheroes or space battles. Corbet made one anyway. He shot on VistaVision. He structured it with an overture and an intermission. He demanded that audiences sit still and pay attention for over three hours. The audacity of that decision in 2025 cannot be overstated.
Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a Jewish-Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who emigrates to America in 1947 with nothing but his vision and his trauma. Brody has been capable of this level of work since The Pianist. He rarely gets roles that demand it. This one does. He finds a man hollowed out by history trying to build something permanent in a country that views him as cheap labor. Guy Pearce plays the wealthy industrialist who becomes Tóth’s patron and eventual destroyer. Felicity Jones plays Tóth’s wife with a quiet devastation that grows more powerful as the film progresses. The supporting cast, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Alessandro Nivola, all deliver work that serves the story without demanding attention.
Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold construct a film about the American Dream that refuses to comfort or inspire. This is not a story of triumph. This is a story about what America does to artists who refuse to compromise. The cinematography by Lol Crawley is astonishing. The production design recreates post-war America with tactile precision. Daniel Blumberg’s score does essential emotional work without overwhelming the images.
This is what cinema can do when it stops being product and remembers it is art.