Wits may joke that the most brutal thing about Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” is its formidable running time. That uncompromising factor apart, there is nothing specifically brutal in execution or content about Corbet’s drama, the title referring to the architectural style practised by the film’s hero, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect, László Tóth, who emigrates to the US in 1947. “The Monumentalist” might have been a better title, certainly as regards the ambition of the film’s ferociously individual writer-director – a dissident among American cineastes, whose allegiances are primarily to the European tradition at its most rigorous.

Jonathan Romney, Screen International