Adrien brody

The extraordinary success of The Brutalist is not something that Hollywood, or anyone else, anticipated. When it was announced for last year’s Venice Film Festival, it was regarded with a degree of interest but not much else. After all, Brady Corbet’s previous two films — The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux — had attracted a degree of critical attention but neither had been an awards player, let alone making any money at the box office. Auteurs can auteur, but the wider Hollywood establishment will only take them seriously if their films make some decent bank. When Chloé Zhao won Best Picture and Best Director for Nomadland, her reward was to be given hackwork on Marvel’s first major flop, Eternals: fingers crossed that her next picture, Hamnet, restores her to critical favor.

The Brutalist, which is a fictional account of a Jewish-Hungarian architect in postwar America, has attracted a great deal of Oscar buzz and has been described as ‘monumental’ and ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘an inversion of the American dream’ and ‘up there with Citizen Kane’. It’s three and a half hours (including a 15-minute intermission) and while the running time isn’t an issue, as it is engrossing enough, it did frequently feel familiar. What film about the American dream isn’t an inversion of the American dream? I couldn’t fathom if it had anything new to say. It felt more like classy potboiler – love! Sex! Money! Power! Raw concrete! What film about the American dream isn’t an inversion of the American dream?

Regardless of what you made of the winners, 2024’s Golden Globes ceremony has gone down in infamy as one of the very worst in its history, entirely due to its terrible host Jo Koy. He was justly ridiculed for his incompetent, weirdly aggressive hosting style, and so the onus was on this year’s compère Nikki Glazer to bring basic professionalism back to the event as much as humor and slickness.

The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but also he has always yearned to make a film about the New Yorker, the magazine with subscribers all round the world, some of whom actually get round to reading it before binning it, and some of whom don’t. (She says, guiltily.) So The French Dispatch is, he has said, the ‘smooching’ of these two ideas, and it is, alas, a ‘smooch’ of a film. That is, not one thing or the other. I would further add it’s as if all the cast had been instructed to act wackily and off-kilter throughout because we won’t get tired of that. But I promise you we quickly do.