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Imagine a film archivist scouring an underground vault in Burbank or a cave in Butte, Montana, and discovering a few dozen dusty film canisters tucked away in a corner. Reels of some long-lost project from Francis Ford Coppola, or Bernardo Bertolucci, or Michael Cimino circa the mid-1970s reside in these tins, bearing all the hallmarks of the big-canvas epics these auteurs made in their heyday. The performances are reminiscent of that decade’s brooding Method-ists and screen chameleons — think Pacino, De Niro, Cazale, Streep. The moody, inky cinematography appears...

Alessandro Nivola has seen portmanteaus like “Barbenheimer” or “Glicked” and decided to raise a moniker for a triumvirate of his own titles on X: “The Kravenist Next Door.” Across two consecutive weekends, the versatile character actor appears in three films opening in the United States. First, he starred as the comic book villain Rhino in Kraven the Hunter, and he also makes a brief appearance as an interrogating cop at the ending of Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language feature debut The Room Next Door.

But Nivola’s role as Atilla in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is the clearest example of why he’s become an actor in such high demand. While this cousin of Adrien Brody’s László Toth only appears at the outset of the film, he casts a long shadow over it. As a Hungarian immigrant to America who precedes László’s arrival by some time, Atilla’s...

Imagine a film archivist scouring an underground vault in Burbank or a cave in Butte, Montana, and discovering a few dozen dusty film canisters tucked away in a corner. Reels of some long-lost project from Francis Ford Coppola, or Bernardo Bertolucci, or Michael Cimino circa the mid-1970s reside in these tins, bearing all the hallmarks of the big-canvas epics these auteurs made in their heyday. The performances are reminiscent of that decade’s brooding Method-ists and screen chameleons — think Pacino, De Niro, Cazale, Streep. The moody, inky cinematography appears...

Brady Corbet’s odyssey into the artistic realms of the 20th century promises, on paper, to be a time-spanning epic. But though the running time is a whopping 3 hours and 35 minutes — with a 15-minute interval whether you want it or not — The Brutalist is, surprisingly, much more intimate than that. The type of 70mm he uses, lensed by regular collaborator Lol Crawley, is not the epic canvas of Lean or Kubrick but a way to propose a sense of scale. It’s the story of a man who thinks big, from a director who also has a vision that doesn’t fit easily into the modest confines of American independent cinema. It falls somewhat short of its lofty target, but it casts a strange spell and often swells with imagination.

Taking his cue from Lars Von Trier, for who he worked as an actor on Melancholia, Brady (with co-writer Mona Fastvold...