Yahoo Movies The Brutalist gets Venice’s longest standing ovation as Adrien Brody tipped for a second Oscar
Adrien Brody has become a frontrunner for Best Actor at the 2025 Oscars thanks to the film
The Brutalist has received the biggest response at the Venice Film Festival so far on Sunday, 1 September, earning a sensational 13-minute standing ovation and early awards buzz for Adrien Brody.
Starring Brody and Felicity Jones, the film explores 30 years of Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor László Toth's life in America after escaping post-war Europe with his wife Erzsébet. The film, directed by Brady Corbet, also stars Guy Pearce and Joe Alwyn, and has received stellar reviews out of the festival.
The cast stepped out in their finest to support the movie at the prestigious film festival, with Brody donning an all-black ensemble and Jones wearing a satin pink gown.
Critics lauded the 3 and a half hour behemoth with praise, with Brody being singled out for his “devastating” performance. If the film does take Brody to Oscars glory in 2025 then it’ll be his first nomination since he won Best Actor for The Pianist in 2003.
The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney wrote that László Toth is Brody’s "best role in years", saying that the actor "pours himself into the character with bristling intelligence and internal fire, holding nothing back as he viscerally conveys both exultant highs and gutting sorrows."
Rooney wrote: "Brody has seldom been better, bringing tremendous gravitas but also a pain that gnaws at László’s prideful sense of self, one of purpose and destiny. It’s a towering performance; seeing the architect treated like garbage is crushing."
IndieWire's David Ehrlich felt similarly about Brody's performance, calling the actor "raw, sincere, and commanding in a role that evokes The Pianist in too many ways to count," adding: "His skinny body and sloping face slowly drooping into a portrait of disillusionment that Corbet will exaggerate in all sorts of awful directions across the back half of this story."
The critic added, however, that the other characters in the film "feel small and undetailed" compared to the film's visually stunning backdrop. Ehrlich wrote: "Jones bares the worst of it, the actor nobly struggling against the confines of a role that never rises above the frustrated voice of reason that it’s meant to represent."
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Deadline’s Damon Wise wrote that the film “casts a strange spell and often swells with imagination”, even if its story feels too big an undertaking for one movie.
The critic added: “Shot with an impressively European veneer that recalls Sunset by Hungarian director László Nemes, Corbet’s film is both an edifice to the practical possibilities of cinema and, more notionally, a memorial to the late, much-missed Scott Walker.”
For Variety's Owen Gleiberman Brody's performance in The Brutalist proved even greater than his work on The Pianist, and that his take on Toth is "even at its quietest, is suffused with tumultuous feeling".
The film itself was described as a "meaty sprawl" by the critic, who adds: "Corbet lets us know, in ways big and small, that he’s making a bold-statement art film.
"The opening credits are the most flamboyantly austere since Tár. The film is divided into chapters with titles like The Enigma of Arrival, and there’s an intermission, programmed for 15 minutes, accompanied by a modernist solo piano performance" — all of which the critic notes may not resonate with every type of viewer, but will have "meaning" for the way it gives the sense of watching a man's life pass by.
The Brutalist will be coming to cinemas soon, but does not yet have a release date.
