The Brutalist
A24 | Release Date: December 20, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
91
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 58 Critic Reviews
Positive:
57
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Radio TimesEmma SimmondsMar 25, 2026
Seven years in the making, The Brutalist is epic in its length, weight and ambition, like a modern-day Orson Welles picture, while it also bears comparison to contemporary masterworks like There Will Be Blood. Read full review
100
NMEPaul BradshawJan 27, 2025
A three hour and thirty minute biopic about art, history, money, sex, trauma and concrete, it’s heavyweight in every sense: a monument to its own greatness that stands a good distance from anything else you’re likely to see at the cinema this year. Read full review
100
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyJan 27, 2025
It’s not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There’s such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity. Read full review
100
iChristina NewlandJan 27, 2025
A work of staggering mystery and power, with an epic scope and a visual style to match, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is old school in the best possible sense. Read full review
100
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeJan 22, 2025
If The Brutalist were not so wedded to audiovisual effect, it might play like a lost Great American Novel. Read full review
100
Little White LiesHannah StrongJan 22, 2025
It is, like those beautiful concrete monstrosities which are revered and reviled in equal measure, a film that towers across the Venice line-up this year, tragic and wry and gorgeous and disturbing – any number of hyperbolic terms might apply to the beast that Corbet has created in The Brutalist. Read full review
100
EmpireJamie GrahamJan 21, 2025
Brady Corbet’s seismic drama reaches for the sky as it surveys the soul of a man and a nation. There will be Oscars. Read full review
100
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesJan 9, 2025
The film literalizes the damage done by the ruling class in ways that are shocking, but they land. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleBob StraussJan 7, 2025
The suffering artist story is as old as time. Yet “The Brutalist” tells it with such specificity and visceral conviction, it feels entirely fresh. Modern, even. Read full review
100
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJan 6, 2025
It’s 3 hours and 35 minutes long (including a 15-minute intermission), and while it’s full and complete, it never drags or feels padded. It is, simply put, a great movie. Read full review
100
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiJan 2, 2025
To say I was never bored wouldn’t be quite right. Rather, I was always transfixed. Read full review
100
Original-CinKaren GordonDec 25, 2024
Helped along by a fantastic cast, the storytelling is so rich and vibrant and the characters so well drawn that the film never flags. Read full review
100
The New YorkerJustin ChangDec 21, 2024
The Brutalist is an American epic of rare authority, and what gives it its power, I think, is what lends some buildings their fascination: a quality of dramatic capaciousness and physical weight, a sense that what we’re seeing was formed and shaped by human hands. Read full review
100
ABC NewsPeter TraversDec 20, 2024
Brady Corbet’s engulfing masterpiece about an immigrant architect (an Oscarbound Adrien Brody) is the best movie of the year, but it’s also way more than that— an unsentimental; uncompromising thunderbolt of pure cinema that Corbet has built to last. Read full review
100
USA TodayBrian TruittDec 19, 2024
The Brutalist is a toxic tale of the immigrant experience and a gripping narrative of love and hope tested through vice and struggle. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithDec 19, 2024
A great American director has announced his presence with a majestic, complicated, somewhat vexing and altogether entrancing film. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoDec 18, 2024
The Brutalist is a work that incorporates well-known world history into two of the definitive forms of expression of the 20th century in architecture and filmmaking, becoming a commentary on both capitalism and art. Read full review
100
SlashfilmChris EvangelistaDec 17, 2024
Watching The Brutalist has the feeling of reading a great, sprawling work of literature; as you near the final pages, you're both thrilled at having made it through the journey while also wishing there were just a few pages more. Read full review
100
Rolling StoneDavid FearSep 9, 2024
It’s not just that they don’t make movies like this anymore — of course they don’t! — so much as no one bothers to tell these types of sprawling narratives with this level of storytelling, chops, nerve and verve. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 5, 2024
This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape. Read full review
100
Time OutPhil de SemlyenSep 3, 2024
The Brutalist is a major work of art that asks something from its audience but gives back in spades. Read full review
100
LooperAudrey FoxSep 2, 2024
The Brutalist is destined to become a classic. Read full review
100
Screen RantAlex HarrisonSep 1, 2024
The Brutalist is a colossal achievement, balancing intimacy and scale at every level of craft. At 3 hours, 35 minutes, it asks a lot from its viewers. Every second is well spent. Read full review
100
The TimesKevin MaherSep 1, 2024
The performances are savagely good, with Pearce and Brody both on awards season form. And it’s shot on rarely seen 70mm film stock, which means that it looks like something beautiful, haunting and strange, but always from the long-forgotten past. Read full review
100
The PlaylistRafaela Sales RossSep 1, 2024
It is hard to conceive of a director this young and early in his career to be able to deliver a film that comes out of the gates with the confidence and grandeur of a classic. And not a classic in the making, but one already made. Read full review
100
The Film StageRory O'ConnorSep 1, 2024
The Brutalist is less-than-perfect (for all his charms, Guy Pearce is no Philip Seymour Hoffman or Daniel Day-Lewis) but it offers an all-too-rare reminder of how it feels when this artform is at its very best, and that has less to do with the scale of its ambitions than how effectively it combines movement, emotion, and sound. Read full review
100
The Daily BeastBarry LevittSep 1, 2024
This film is monumental. It’s thrilling and emotional, quiet and observant, loud and furious. Corbet’s film is a provocative portrait of the pursuit of the American dream. Read full review
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 1, 2024
As a state-of-the-US historical epic, it boasts all the thematic heft of Once Upon a Time in America or There Will Be Blood. (How did the wave of postwar immigrants remake America in their image – and how did America remake them in return?) But it’s also acted with the colour and fizz of a classical Hollywood comic drama, and shot with the loose, rangy energy of a 90-minute indie cult hit. The tonal mix feels completely unique, but it works. Read full review
95
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzDec 19, 2024
The Brutalist is a movie of big ideas constructed inside the transformative majesty of epic-scaled cinema. You can try to describe it, but nothing can match the power of simply opening your eyes. Read full review
90
SlateDana StevensJan 14, 2025
The magisterial (yet also often funny) performances from virtually every member of the cast, the rigor which with it explores complex characters and ideas, and the sheer painterly beauty of its compositions make this one of the few movies this year I almost immediately went back to see for a second time. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisDec 20, 2024
Many movies offer up a slice of reality; true to the architectural aesthetic that its title invokes, this one offers a slab. Read full review
90
IGNChase HutchinsonDec 19, 2024
Like the imposing, unadorned structures of brutalism (think: Boston City Hall, the blocky public housing of the Soviet Union, modern additions to any university campus), it can feel at times intentionally ugly or rudimentary. But it’s also a breathtaking work that’s simultaneously maximalist and minimalist – a searing movie that’s poetic on a formal, storytelling, and thematic level. Read full review
90
The Daily BeastNick SchagerDec 18, 2024
A harrowing 215-minute epic of perseverance, trauma, exploitation, and anti-Semitism, it’s a bracing examination of the scars of war, the difficulty of recovery, and the genius, madness, and self-destruction begat by calamity. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonDec 18, 2024
The Brutalist argues, and proves by its very existence, that the maddening thing about major works of art is that they demand invention and resources and cooperation. Read full review
90
Paste MagazineLuke HicksSep 30, 2024
For every beat of affecting brutalism, there is an equally affecting beat of brutality. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 1, 2024
The Brutalist is a massive film in every sense, closing with a resonant epilogue that illustrates how art and beauty reach out from the past, transcending space and time to reveal a freedom of thought and identity often denied its makers. Read full review
88
Movie NationRoger MooreJan 19, 2025
You’d be hard-pressed to think of a motion picture parable that more perfectly fits its moment and the mood of the country and the world it premiered into. Corbet has tapped into the zeitgeist as well as The American Myth and made a movie that makes you wince because he, like László Tóth, refused to sentimentalize it or avert his eyes from the ugliness. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 9, 2025
The Brutalist is many things: some blunt, others loose and dangling, still others richly provocative, most of them remarkable. Read full review
88
The Associated PressJocelyn NoveckDec 18, 2024
Though not for everyone, it’s a film that can justifiably be described as “epic” in ambition and design. And, wouldn’t you know, ambition and design are precisely what the movie’s about. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineMarshall ShafferSep 24, 2024
Brady Corbet builds on celluloid what Adrien Brody’s László Toth does with concrete: an unvarnished monument to the authentic American character. Read full review
85
The AtlanticDavid SimsJan 10, 2025
The highest compliment I can bestow on it is that Corbet’s drive has paid dividends, leaving much for me to puzzle through. Read full review
85
TheWrapBen CrollSep 4, 2024
Taken as a whole, The Brutalist both mourns and celebrates American ambition –the ambitions of an immigrant class trying for a new life with no guarantee of success, and the ambitions of a filmmaker filling a canvas with a lifetime of obsessions. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichSep 1, 2024
Corbet and Fastvold’s script is left to engineer a reductive non-climax that illustrates the relationship between capitalist and laborer in the most obvious terms imaginable. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeJan 27, 2025
The screenplay dwells obsessively on certain aspects and rushes blithely past others. The craft of the film-making, though, is exemplary. Read full review
80
ColliderRoss BonaimeSep 17, 2024
Despite its occasional flaws, The Brutalist is one of the most remarkable films of the year, and proof that Corbet is a fascinating filmmaker to keep an eye on. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekSep 3, 2024
The Brutalist is a kind of crazy space church, designed specifically for the communal moviegoing experience. It's a place to gather and give thanks. Read full review
80
VarietyOwen GleibermanSep 1, 2024
It’s clear that Corbet made this movie because he wants it to mean something big. Whether it does may be in the eye of the beholder. Mostly, The Brutalist lets you feel that you’re seeing a man’s life pass before your eyes. That may be meaning enough. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonJan 10, 2025
The Brutalist reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.” With both films, I found the first half spectacular, while the second half left me dissatisfied and scratching my head. Read full review
75
Washington PostTy BurrJan 8, 2025
Maybe it’s too early in his career for Corbet to reach for a ring this big and this brassy. Yet “The Brutalist” earns its weight in the telling, if not in cumulative impact or meaning. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJan 8, 2025
Even with the occasional stumble and that self-indulgent running time, this is a unique and at times brilliant piece of work. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 19, 2024
It rewards patience not only in the way it crafts its central character but develops the era in which it transpires. Read full review
75
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenDec 6, 2024
The Brutalist is a momentous movie, if not quite as momentous as it thinks it is. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubBrianna ZiglerOct 3, 2024
The Brutalist is operating in the shadow of a tradition of cinematic epics, there is an expected journey the film has the opportunity to stray from, and it doesn’t nearly enough. Read full review
70
Vanity FairRichard LawsonDec 21, 2024
Brody and Pearce vividly manifest Corbet’s arguments about the clash between art and money, between the old world and the new. When they are blazing away on screen together, The Brutalist swells to epic size—two craftsmen prodigiously working to realize their architect’s flawed and awesome vision. Read full review
70
The Film VerdictStephen DaltonSep 5, 2024
The Brutalist aims for symphonic grandeur and novelistic depth. It partially succeeds, though it too often mistakes pomposity for profundity, and bloated verbosity for literary nuance. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreSep 1, 2024
It’s impossible not to be impressed by the sheer audacity of The Brutalist’s existence, even if the finished product doesn’t end up matching its ambitions. Read full review
70
Screen DailyJonathan RomneySep 1, 2024
The Brutalist is defiantly its own kind of construction, but longueurs and narrative inertia make it not quite the resounding statement it aspires to be. Read full review
50
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJan 6, 2025
With its clean lines and precise assembly, it's nearly devoid of fundamental practicalities, and, so, remains an idea for a movie about ideas, an outline for a drama that's still in search of its characters. Read full review
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