Almodóvar, Corbet, Reijn

First and foremost among these is Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a serious contender for the Golden Lion that will screen in Toronto as a Special Presentation and in New York’s Main Slate. If for nothing more than its sheer ambition—a tale spanning thirty-three years, shot on VistaVision and projected on 70 mm, with a running time of more than three and a half hours, not counting the fifteen-minute intermission—The Brutalist drew spontaneous comparisons on Sunday to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), prompting programmer Edo Choi to respond, “Guys, chill out. Please.”

Having survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) arrives in New York in the late 1940s, scrounging for work and yearning to reunite with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). Eventually, he lands a commission from a wealthy industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), and turns it into an opportunity to realize his grandest vision.

Time’s Stephanie Zacharek seems to speak for many when she calls The Brutalist “half a great film: the hefty chunk of movie leading up to that intermission is as exhilarating as anything you’re likely to see this year—there’s a Rite of Spring brashness to it. But in the second half, its bold, angular lines soften into something more oblique and conventional, even though some of the plot elements are quite harrowing. It’s as if Corbet, along with his regular co-writer Mona Fastvold, used all their best ideas in their master-builder climb to the top, without figuring out how they might climb down.”

Reviewing The Brutalist for Screen, Jonathan Romney finds “a visual magnificence that, while sumptuous, adheres to an essential austerity that Toth would approve of. Lol Crawley’s cinematography and Judy Becker’s imposing designs make this something to be marveled at visually, not least in a genuinely hallucinatory sequence in the marble quarries of Carrara. The dramatic flaws are, however, inescapable.” But for the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, “the film maintains a steely grip on its own ornate schemes. It’s cinema as monument—but also teeming human enterprise.”

Collin is also an eager champion of Babygirl, though he readily admits that Halina Reijn’s third feature was met in Venice with “a mix of catcalls and cheers.” As Romy, a high-flying New York CEO who tumbles into a fling with Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a young intern, Nicole Kidman is “ferociously good, convincing utterly as this formerly level-headed careerist whose deeply buried, long-denied appetites are simultaneously proving her making and downfall.” Antonio Banderas “wonderfully underplays the part of her loving but oblivious husband,” while Dickinson, “the breakout star of 2022’s Triangle of Sadness, gives us just enough insight into Samuel’s thoughts scene by scene—and not a crumb more—to keep both Romy and us in a tremblingly uncertain headspace. He’s the Gen-Z bunny boiler cinema never knew it needed.”

Vulture’s Alison Willmore notes that Babygirl is “being billed in some corners as an erotic thriller, though it doesn’t insist on the moral consequences that have traditionally been just as central to the subgenre as the steamy clinches. Reijn, late of the underwhelming cool-kid horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, is a Dutch filmmaker who’s essentially on a cultural safari through the remnants of American puritanism, and the only sexual hangups she explores are the ones Romy herself has internalized. Babygirl never bothers to genuinely reckon with the damage that could be wrought by the head of a company having an illicit affair with a junior employee. Instead, it approaches its own potentially sordid scenario with a giddy deliriousness.” Babygirl “is not a tale of punishment, but an adventure into self-discovery that’s unabashedly indulgent but always surprising.”

At RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kenny points out that “Kidman has garnered kudos for an uninhibited and daring performance, but when has she ever shied away from uninhibited and daring performances? I love to see them always, but I love to see them even more in good movies.” For the Guardian’s Xan Brooks, “Reijn’s drama deserves credit for its lack of cheap moralizing and suggests that even the most reckless affair can bring unforeseen benefits.” But “for all its excited carnality and seesawing power struggles, the film’s thrills feel machine-tooled and vacuum-packed.” Babygirl now heads to Toronto before opening on Christmas Day.

Brooks is far more enthusiastic when it comes to Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, “a hothouse Spanish shrub transplanted to stony foreign soil. It wilts and it droops; it almost gives up the ghost. Then when it flowers it feels like a small miracle. The film’s very fragility is what makes it so gorgeous.”

Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, The Room Next Door—a Special Presentation in Toronto and the Centerpiece in New York’s Main Slate—stars Tilda Swinton as Martha, a former war correspondent dying of cervical cancer, and Julianne Moore as Ingrid, an acclaimed writer of autofiction. They were close once, and even shared a lover (John Turturro), but the years have intervened. Martha longs to catch up and asks Ingrid for a few days to talk, watch Buster Keaton movies, and wander used bookstores in upstate New York before she takes the pill that will relieve her of the pain that has taken over her final days: “I think I deserve a good death.”

“No male filmmaker has more consistently understood female characters and the actresses playing them than Pedro Almodóvar, a virtue that rescues the treasured director’s first English-language feature from the reams of prose-style dialogue in its establishing scenes,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “Swinton and Moore imbue the movie with heart that at first seems elusive, along with the dignity, humanity, and empathy that are as much Almodóvar’s subjects here as mortality. What ultimately makes the movie affecting is its appreciation for the consolation of companionship during the most isolating time of life.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson is particularly taken with “a striking scene in which Martha bitterly explains that she has lost much of her taste for life. Her cognition, still affected by chemotherapy, is too weary for reading or listening to music. She is a person of ideas and yet it’s as if a door to her mind has shut forever. Who is she (and who, maybe, is Almodóvar) without the curiosity and hunger that has long defined her? It’s an upsetting notion to sit with, that any of us might one day be so foreign to ourselves—that our tastes and preferences and passions might not be as fixed as we thought. If Almodóvar is experiencing something like that himself, it is not evident in his recent work. We can take some comfort in that.”