‘The Brutalist’ and ‘Nickel Boys’ are 2 ambitious and captivating dramas

It’s a common complaint among moviegoers that the best new films aren’t released until the last few months or even weeks of the year, so as to maximize their Oscar prospects. While that’s not always the case — great movies are, in fact, released all year round — I do wish audiences hadn’t had to wait until December to see Nickel Boys and The Brutalist. They’re both ambitious period dramas, directed by two filmmakers of extraordinary talent and vision.

Nickel Boys is simply one of the most thrillingly inventive literary adaptations I’ve seen in years. It’s based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, about two Black boys, in 1960s Florida, who are sent to a reform school called Nickel Academy.

Elwood, played by Ethan Herisse, is a studious teenager who lands in Nickel after unwittingly hitching a ride in a stolen car. At Nickel, he meets Turner, played by Brandon Wilson. The two forge a close friendship that sustains them through the tedium and the terror of life at Nickel.

Whitehead based his story on real-life events at Florida’s Dozier School for Boys, which operated from 1900 to 2011, and where many students were found to have been abused, tortured and, in some cases, murdered by staff. Elwood, an idealist deeply inspired by the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., believes he can get out of Nickel through legal channels, with some help from his loving grandmother, wonderfully played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. But the more cynical, streetwise Turner has his doubts.

Nickel Boys is the first narrative feature written and directed by RaMell Ross, who previously made Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a lyrical documentary about Black life in Alabama. Remarkably, Ross’ filmmaking has lost none of its poetry here. He and his cinematographer, Jomo Fray, have boldly decided to tell the story in the visual equivalent of first person, so that, at any given moment, you’re seeing the world through the eyes of either Elwood or Turner.

The approach takes some getting used to, but the effect is astonishing. It calls on us to empathize in a radical new way with these two young men, their fleeting hopes and their crushing sense of entrapment. By toggling between Elwood’s and Turner’s perspectives, and showing us how much they depend on each other, the movie makes us feel as if their souls are truly connected — an achievement that becomes all the more heartbreaking as the film goes on.

The Brutalist is no less beautifully shot than Nickel Boys, but it’s told in a more straightforward, classically sweeping fashion. Adrien Brody, in his best performance since he won an Oscar for The Pianist, stars as László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who arrives in New York in 1947. Back in his native Hungary, before the war, László was an architect, famed for designing austere, unadorned buildings. In the U.S. — he winds up in Pennsylvania — he’s a nobody, shoveling coal and struggling with a heroin addiction.

But then, László finds an unlikely benefactor in Harrison Lee Van Buren, a self-made titan of industry who lives in Doylestown, just north of Philadelphia; he’s played, magnificently, by Guy Pearce. Harrison learns of László’s European reputation and hires him to design a local community center — a years-long project that will become an expensive, all-consuming obsession. In time, László is reunited with his wife, Erzsébet — a very good Felicity Jones — from whom he was separated during the war. But her return can only do so much to ground him as he succumbs to the pull of ambition and addiction.

The Brutalist is clearly in conversation with The Fountainhead; like Ayn Rand‘s architect protagonist, Howard Roark, László is a stubborn, uncompromising visionary. But the actor-turned-filmmaker Brady Corbet, who previously directed the corrosive pop-star psychodrama Vox Lux, is chasing after some thorny ideas of his own. The Brutalist is about the challenges of cultural assimilation, the crucial role that immigrant labor played in America’s postwar boom and the inherent power imbalance between patrons and artists. It’s also about antisemitism: László is tolerated — barely — within Harrison’s WASP-y inner circle; his genius makes him interesting and valuable to them, but it also makes him exploitable.

Not everything about The Brutalist works; one late plot twist seems a touch literal-minded, and I’m still chewing over the meaning of the final act. But Corbet, who’s only 36, is already a director of startling confidence, and he’s made a rare American film that feels genuinely worthy of the word “epic.” Here I should note that The Brutalist runs three hours and 35 minutes and holds you for every one of them. There is a 15-minute intermission, and I couldn’t wait for it to end.