The Brutalist, Dir. Brady Corbet (December 20)
If you’re the kind of person who pontificates about how “they don’t make them like they used to”, I expect to find you at a screening of The Brutalist. Touted by many as “monumental”, as its trailer emphasized, wunderkind director Brady Corbet’s breakout has stunned festival audiences in Venice, Toronto, and New York, drawing comparisons to There Will Be Blood.
As for its plot, per A24’s website, “Escaping post-war Europe, visionary architect László Toth [Adrien Brody] arrives in America to rebuild his life, his work, and his marriage to his wife Erzsébet [Felicity Jones] after being forced apart during wartime by shifting borders and regimes. On his own in a strange new country, László settles in Pennsylvania, where the wealthy and prominent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren [Guy Pearce] recognizes his talent for building. But power and legacy come at a heavy cost…”.
Its centermost performances, particularly Brody who eyes his first Best Actor Academy Award since his 2003 win for The Pianist, have been showered with praise. Here is a film that dares to enter the pantheon of great American epics. Depending on the moviegoer, its 3-hour, 35-minute runtime (with intermission) will either be a deterrent or some kind of colossal, cinephilic attraction. The Brutalist currently holds a 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating with 80 reviews.
A Complete Unknown, Dir. James Mangold (December 25)
A textbook piece of Oscar bait (neutral connotation), anticipation and early reactions to James Mangold’s spiritual successor to his 2005 hit Walk The Line have been resoundingly mild. A Complete Unknown, a biopic of Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet), follows his rise to fame in the early 1960s. There seems to be fatigue for both Timothee Chalamet as a leading man and the musical biopic subgenre as a whole, and it doesn’t help that few critics are praising it as an elite rendition.
Nonetheless, Chalamet’s portrayal of the enigma has earned him a wave of Oscar buzz that is par for the course, as has Ed Norton as folk legend Pete Seeger. A Complete Unknown is the kind of assemblage of talent, both in its talent on screen and behind the camera, that is rarely a waste of time. A Complete Unknown waltzes into a Christmas release slot and offers a fine source of nostalgia and fanfare. It currently holds a 76% Rotten Tomatoes rating with 78 reviews.
Nosferatu, Dir. Robert Eggers (December 25)
Those who seek genre fare with auteurist sensibilities will find a fine piece of it in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. The 41-year-old writer-director’s latest edition to a burgeoning filmography (The Lighthouse, The Witch, The Northman) is a remake of the famous 1922 German expressionist horror film of the same name.
Per Focus Features, “Nosferatu is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror”. Eggers rendition on the classic story has been universally acclaimed, as have performances from Lily Rose-Depp and Nicholas Hoult. It currently holds a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating with 92 reviews.
