Adrien Brody, A24 and a Teacup
Director Brady Corbet’s newest feature, The Brutalist, is not for the faint of heart, with a runtime of a whopping 215 minutes!
The upcoming epic will follow 30 years in the life of Lászlo Tóth (played by Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survived the Holocaust. After the end of WWII, he emigrated to the United States with his wife, Ersébet (played by Felicity Hoffman), to experience the “American dream.”
The film was shot in 70mm VistaVision with Corbet stating:
“It just seemed like the best way to access that period (1950s) was to shoot on something that was engineered in the same decade.”
Corbet is perhaps such a formally ambitious director due to his virtuoso dark performances as an actor.
His first feature acting role was in the scandalous coming-of-age film as Mason Freeland, the older brother to Evan Rachel Wood’s Tracy in the lascivious coming-of-age film, Thirteen (2003, clip).
He went on to play the happy-go-lucky psychopathic Peter in Funny Games (2007, trailer).
His last acting role was as the memorable cult recruiter Watts in the 2011 psychological thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene.
Just shortly after, Corbet won Best Director at the 72nd Venice Film Festival for his directorial debut, the historical drama Childhood of a Leader (2013, trailer). This film centers on a little boy trapped in his authoritarian parent's ice-cold farmhouse, fueling a terrible inner rage and grooming him to bring terror to the whole human race.
Corbet’s sophomore film, Von Lux (2018), like his other two movies, is a period piece but not as dated. Set in the early 2000s, the musical drama starred Natalie Portman as a popstar haunted by a school shooting.
Despite his abundant budget for The Brutalist, Corbet said:
“I really believe that the future of theatrical exhibition is large format… I want to send a message to the filmmaking community that large format is available to them even on an independent film.”
The Brutalist will premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival just as his prior two films did.
A24 is reverting back to its roots with a new horror film, Altar, from director Egor Abramenko (Sputnik).
While plot details of Altar have yet to be revealed the project is described as a horror film that follows the summer of a young boy, forced to grow up faster than he ever imagined.
Blonde beauty January Jones (Mad Men), comedian David Krumholtz (Oppenheimer), and iconic character actor Kyle MacLachlan (Fallout) are set to star in the scary film from Westworld (2016-2022) writer Will Soodik.
Egor Abramenko is an award-winning director whose terrifying directorial debut, the graphic space horror Sputnik (2020, trailer) from Sony, follows a controversial young doctor summoned to a secluded research facility at the height of the Cold War and examines a cosmonaut who may not have returned to Earth alone.
No official dates regarding A24’s Altar have been announced.
Moving onto more aliens, The Silent Planet, which just premiered at Fantasia Fest, centers on two humans running into each other on an isolated planet. One is a prisoner there tasked with doing some penal colony mining (very Twilight Zone-esque), and the other is a convicted terrorist. We’re not sure if, from the first clip, we should be expecting a cute meet, but there’s a peculiar intensity to it that’s somewhat charming.
The director is Jeffrey St. Jules, whose debut feature BANG BANG BABY premiered at TIFF (trailer). That project is purposefully campy, while The Silent Planet seems understated.
Tidbit:
Horror trio, EP’d by genre masters (and expect a lot more coming from them given Longlegs success):
Creator: Ian McCulloch (consulting producer: Yellowstone)
EP: James Wan (Saw, Insidious)
Distributor: Peacock
Synopsis: A disparate group of people in rural Georgia who must come together in the face of a mysterious threat in order to survive.
Teaser trailer. Releasing October 10th.
Scare Tactics (reboot)
Showrunner: Elan Gale (consulting producer: Midnight Mass)
Production Company: Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw
Distributor: USA Network