Before The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s greatest sequence of filmmaking comes at the end of his debut, The Childhood of a Leader.  By the end, the rebellious kid has grown into the titular leader, a fascist facsimile greeted by a wild crowd on his way to who knows what atrocity.  The spinning, disorienting camera is part of the crowd, pushing and jostling to get a look.  It’s a shocking way to end an imperfect film, and Corbet carries that same style into the beginning of The Brutalist.  This time, the camera is part of a crowd in the hold of a ship headed to Ellis Island, and where it landed in an ominous place for Childhood of a Leader, here it lands on the Statue of Liberty after emerging from the literal dark of the hold and the metaphorical dark of WWII Europe.  Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) is overjoyed to be here, and the film is too based on the way that Daniel Blumberg’s score is building, but that camera style implies something else.  The Brutalist brings titanic cinematic might to bear from its first scene, self-consciously filmed in VistaVision to evoke the grand epic road shows of the Hollywood studio system heyday.  It reeks of importance and achievement, and it delivers on what it promises through Corbet’s will and ambition and his collaboration with an immensely talented cast and crew.  ​

​In Jonathan Glaser’s The Zone of Interest, a father and son, depicted as earnest and industrious factory owners who take pride in their work, make a big sale to a major prospective client.  The actors portraying them do an excellent job of feeling excited but downplaying it, as though the characters are too decent to be good at hiding their emotions well.  This scene could be the climax of an underdog story, where the elderly father’s dream of building something that will guarantee his legacy and the success of his descendants is finally achieved.  Instead, it’s one horrifying entry of many, as the company is selling incinerators to Nazi death camps, each efficiently designed to function around the clock.  Glazer’s film focuses on the client, Commandant Rudolf Hess (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller), and their five children who live in a homestead directly abutting the walls of Auschwitz.  Like the factory owners, they’re carrying out their own stories while hundreds of thousands are being snuffed out a few hundred meters away.  Glazer uses all his considerable cinematic talents to observe and contextualize this family, never letting them forget how it is they’ve come to live the good life and watching as they shrug.  

Tom Cruise is a movie star who insists on getting things right.  No matter what the audience thinks about his role as highly placed cult official, he’s undeniably a craftsman who takes immense pride in his work, even at the risk of his very expensive safety.  It therefore seems inevitable that he would star in a period vehicle that elevates and valorizes a Japanese ethic of expertise and excellence, especially in the immediate years after filming Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick, he of the endless, repetitive takes.  Cruise finds the perfect historical epic that both validates his approach to work and turns him into the adaptable genius who is capable of mastering anything.  In its subtextual flattery of Cruise, The Last Samurai, directed by historical epic veteran Ed Zwick, smells like a more pungent variety of white savior trope than it actually is.  The film itself works as one of the best examples of white-man-meets-foreign-culture.  It doesn’t totally avoid the various pitfalls, but it skillfully navigates them.  

​Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, my favorite book, doesn’t introduce its protagonist or any of its main characters for its first sixty pages.  As is typical of sprawling 19th century novels, the lengthy prologue is given over to historical scene-setting through the eyes of a minor character, the bishop who will set Jean Valjean on his path to redemption.  One of these early chapters is given over to the bishop’s encounter with a dying revolutionary who was present at the major events of the French Revolution some decades earlier.  The bishop starts off indignant about all the crimes of the Reign of Terror, especially against Queen Marie Antoinette and her children, but the revolutionary grants him sympathy for them if he’ll extend the same sympathy to the millions who suffered under absolute monarchy.  Focusing on well-known sufferers is a choice that lacks scope and imagination, memorably described by Hugo as taking in the thunderbolt and ignoring the storm clouds that made it possible.  Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is all thunderbolt, a fatally flawed film whose considerable style and technical mastery cannot overshadow how perverse it is to frame Madame Deficit as any kind of victim of the patriarchy.  History or feminism owes this person nothing, and no small amount of pleasure is taken from knowing that many of the people onscreen , including her, are going to get theirs.  However, if a film is going to be this unnecessary, it may as well be as fun as this one is.