Every year, there seems to be one (or more) big Oscar contender that completely misses my heart, mind, and understanding. I see them and I don’t understand their universal acclaim and often-overinflated hype. For 2024, the highest of those movies is The Brutalist, starring Best Actor Oscar frontrunner Adrien Brody. He is excellent, but the rest of the movie is not. I was chuffed enough to go on the Kicking the Seat podcast and YouTube channel hosted by Ian Simmons to speak on it.
Read MoreThe trouble is The Brutalist cannot decide whether to peck at that facade with an awl or swing at it with a sledgehammer. Too often, it hands the wrong figurative tool to the actors for the wrong moments. Appreciably, Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce are formidably locked into their roles and stalwart in their respective characters’ competing visions and varying sins of pride. However, big moments get unsuccessfully needled while small ones get overly demolished, which ultimately betrays more characters than Brody’s and Pearce’s
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