{"id":3868,"date":"2025-01-20T18:12:07","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T18:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3868"},"modified":"2025-07-27T13:39:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T12:39:03","slug":"pre-oscars-2025-the-brutalist-emilia-perez-nosferatu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/01\/20\/pre-oscars-2025-the-brutalist-emilia-perez-nosferatu\/","title":{"rendered":"Pre-Oscars 2025: The Brutalist, Emilia Perez, Nosferatu"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Brutalist<\/em> <\/strong>is a long movie, and that tends to please Oscar voters. Shot on VistaVision (35mm film passing through the camera sideways), with heavyweight themes, a powerhouse cast, a rumbling score, an interval and an overture, it is seemingly hand-milled, weapons-grade Oscar bait. This would be far more frustrating if it was a less interesting film. In fact, my chief complaint after 200 minutes of screentime is that it ends abruptly.<\/p>\n

It does teeter on the brink of wilful obscurity towards the end, as the actions of powerful tycoon Harrison van Buren (Guy Pearce, seemingly cos-playing as Brad Pitt) make less and less sense and the respective fates of L\u00e1szl\u00f3 T\u00f3th and his family are barely sketched in during the coda. But for much of the running time, this is engrossing powerful stuff with a great sense of place and character, and a detailed and sensitive portrayal of loss and ego from Adrien Brody.<\/p>\n

The choice of VistaVision is interesting too. On a big screen, this doesn\u2019t gleam. The oppressive Philadelphia weather combines with the grainy film stock to create an image which glimmers and glooms, but that only adds to the constant eerie threat of potential danger, as this once-feted architect tries to claw his way up from the bottom of the heap in which he finds himself. Adding to the disquiet is the use of sound, with odd phrases, noises and rumblings often drifting in from the edges of the screen, adding to the feeling that we aren\u2019t being shown something, we\u2019re peering in on it.<\/p>\n

Felicity Jones doesn\u2019t get much to do alas \u2013 third billed but she only really appears in the second half, and there are disquieting rumours about AI being used to autotune her accent and Brody\u2019s, but what shocks me most is that someone let sitcom actor Brady Corbet loose with $10m to make this epic. Don\u2019t get me wrong, on the whole I\u2019m very glad they did, I just can\u2019t understand what the pitch would have been like.<\/p>\n

And I could say similar things about Emilia Perez<\/strong><\/em>, Jacques Audiard\u2019s film about which I\u2019m going to be circumspect as I knew very little about it going in and I\u2019d love you to be as surprised as I am. It\u2019s a startling combination of some incredibly fresh and original material, wrapped in some equally incredibly clich\u00e9d plot twists. Zoe Salda\u00f1a is absolutely electric as under-appreciated lawyer Rita Mora Castro, whose dealings with the mysterious Emilia P\u00e9rez gradually lead her to become embroiled in Mexican cartels, politics, corruption and eventually violence.<\/p>\n

Selina Gomez shows a little more range here than she typically does on Only Murders in the Building<\/em>, but this is Salda\u00f1a\u2019s show, especially during the musical numbers. Look out for her rendition of \u201cEl Mal\u201d at all the awards shows. The last half hour is by far the least interesting, as the plot can only be resolved by means of overfamiliar gangster and action movie tropes, but the journey that got us there is a real shot of cinematic adrenaline.<\/p>\n

Also filling up a big screen and making terrific use of sound is the third screen version of Nosferatu<\/strong><\/em>, originally shot by Murnau in the silent era as a way of ripping off Dracula without having to pay any royalties. I hadn\u2019t seen this or the Klaus Kinski version, so I felt a little as if I hadn\u2019t done my homework. Following a little subsequent research, it seems as if writer-director Robert Eggers\u2019s chief concern was to shore up plot holes in the existing iterations. This leads to a very handsomely mounted production, full of committed performances (Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily Rose-Depp, Willem Dafoe and especially Emma Corrin) but it ended up not feeling very much. Rather as if I\u2019d played through a really atmospheric and well-done computer game rather than been told a deeply personal story. Extra points for Simon McBurney as Herr Knock who knows that this part has no top for him to go over and goes absolutely for broke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Brutalist is a long movie, and that tends to please Oscar voters. Shot on VistaVision (35mm film passing through the camera sideways), with heavyweight themes, a powerhouse cast, a rumbling score, an interval and an overture, it is seemingly hand-milled, weapons-grade Oscar bait. This would be far more frustrating if it was a less […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[12,13,19],"class_list":["post-3868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-movies","tag-oscars","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-10o","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3868"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4004,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3868\/revisions\/4004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}