Which film should I watch tonight? ‘The Brutalist,’ a potential Oscar nominee that justifies its lengthy duration.

Every year, there’s at least one big Oscar-nominated movie that takes on the patina of homework: the long, anguished slog that only movie critics could love and therefore bully the Academy into recognizing. This year’s prime candidate is The Brutalist, currently available on premium VOD as its theatrical run winds down at the end of Oscar season. It’s the longest of all Best Picture nominees this year and longer than any 2024 movie playing on large screens, lacking the immediate genre pleasures of comedy, thriller, or horror. Despite seemingly begging to be skipped by those not fully committed to a three-and-a-half hour movie about an architect, The Brutalist is one of the actual best of this year’s nominees, standing out for its unique qualities.

If you have the time to spare, The Brutalist is easily one of the best of this year’s Best Picture nominees, defying the need for familiar subjects or grand spectacles. Its exceptional filmmaking creates a unique center of gravity that captivates the audience from the very beginning. The movie’s opening sequence depicts László Tóth, a Hungarian Jew emigrating to the United States after surviving the Holocaust in World War II-era Europe. Separated from his wife Erzsébet, Tóth’s first glimpse of his new home is symbolized by an iconic shot of the upside-down Statue of Liberty, creating an emotional peak that resonates throughout the film.

The director and co-writer of The Brutalist, Brady Corbet, along with cinematographer Lol Crawley and composer Daniel Blumberg, craft a mesmerizing cinematic experience that builds towards significant moments such as Tóth’s poignant arrival in America. The film’s careful construction and attention to detail establish a visual and emotional connection reminiscent of epic ’70s cinema like Francis Ford Coppola’s work. Through its expert direction and evocative storytelling, The Brutalist sets itself apart as a powerful and deserving contender among this year’s Best Picture nominees.

One of the movie’s finest, strangest achievements is how Corbet manages to catch the tenor of a movie like Godfather II without the salacious intrigue of a crime plot. (Not that there’s a lack of crimes and other bad behavior in the film, but there’s also not an incident as traditionally suspenseful as young Vito Corleone’s violent revenge on a local don.) Arriving in Philadelphia, Tóth meets up with his assimilated cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who provides a place to stay and a job at his furniture store. This is how he happens to meet Harry Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), whose son hires the business to built bookshelves for his father’s opulent study. Eventually, following a streak of the mistreatments that typify the American immigrant story, Tóth – an architect in his home country, the extent of his accomplishments not clear until this point, well into the movie – is hired to design and build a community center for Van Buren. This massive project and its attendant struggles take up the bulk of the film’s hefty running time.

About that: In theaters, the movie has a built-in 15-minute intermission, after its first “act” ends with another unlikely crescendo accompanied by narration from a letter, this one heralding the arrival of Erzsébet to join her husband. The ensuing interlude brings its official runtime to 215 minutes – over three and a half hours, but really just (just!) three hours and 20 minutes of movie, which is broken out so neatly that it can easily function as a double feature of “normal”-length movies, with an at-home break of your choosing.

That said, the movie’s immersiveness on a big screen is formidable, even as the cast of characters remains relatively intimate. There are just a few people we get to know in detail: László, Erzsébet, and Van Buren, an industrialist who is delighted to serve as a great artist’s patron – until he notices, perhaps too late, that László’s vision, and the project itself, may not show him proper deference. Perhaps overmuch has been made (by critics, and by Corbet himself) of The Brutalist as a metaphor for the Herculean task of Making Art, specifically something as resource-consuming and (in present conditions) difficult as a film. But the movie is most fascinating as a film about ownership: Tóth is building something personal that Van Buren feels, by virtue of his money and his land and his power, belongs to him, even if he makes noise about serving the community at large. That multi-directional push and pull between vision, stubbornness, ego, and capitalism, all in service of a structure whose full scope and personal meaning are not shown to us until the very end, feels like a perfectly fraught depiction of this country as one built by immigrants who nonetheless risk destruction in its vast machinery. So yeah, it’s a move about America.

Those are the kinds of terms that may rankle skeptics of The Brutalist, who make the (not entirely invalid) point that maybe Corbet and his collaborator Mona Fastvold too transparently yearns for big-picture importance, perhaps more than some of the film’s writing bears out. It’s certainly striking to see Corbet operating so self-consciously in the ’70s New Hollywood mode the same year that Francis Ford Coppola, an actual director of movies from this era, returned with his own architect-centric opus. Coppola’s Megalopolis is more ridiculously Randian in its half-baked themes but arguably freer, less constrained by his own history, more deliriously inventive in the parts of film history it pulls from, than the more solemn good taste of Corbet’s film. Yet it is invigorating, to see a youngish director working in that old-fashioned mode, striving for a movie that despite a relatively small cast, shockingly low budget, and likelihood that it will be seen on a moderate-sized home screen, feels monumental by design. If the Academy was tricked by its bigness into honoring it, well, that feels pretty American, too.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.