Felicity Jones is Brody's wife and Guy Pearce is the tycoon financing his dream building in a drama that turns into a parable about… many things.

By Owen Gleiberman

If you see only one insanely ambitious, wildly allegorical film this year about a legendary architect whose dream is to design buildings that will define the future, make it “The Brutalist.” In other words, I’m saying you should choose “The Brutalist,” the third feature directed by Brady Corbet, over Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” an architectural saga that’s entertaining for about an hour before descending into a folly that’s anything but grand. Why did Coppola, the great retro-classicist of the new Hollywood, ever convince himself he was an avant-garde visionary? “Megalopolis” is a film that shatters into glittering fragments.

But with “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet goes in a different direction. His first two films, the fascist parable “The Childhood of a Leader” (2015) and the pop star parable “Vox Lux” (2018), had flashes of brilliance amid a sea of indulgence. But “The Brutalist” comes close to being a work of retro-classicism. Clocking in at three hours and 15 minutes, it’s pleasingly stately paced and overflowing with incident and emotion — and it spins the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who travels from Budapest to America after World War II, as if Corbet were making a biopic of a real person.