The Brutalist lands as something of a sibling to another ambitious and literary epic of the year about an uncompromising architect devoted to bold poetic aesthetics in the face of cold commercial interests who don't understand or appreciate these priorities but quietly resent them, which would obviously be Megalopolis. Brutalist adds themes of antisemitic persecution - unlike Caesar, The Brutalist's Laszlo Toth is not an elite scion, but a perpetual outsider, making his exploitation and sense of exclusion much more…

Looks like there's still some untapped gems from the '70s. This small-budget picture got hit with an 'X', and immediately flopped, and I don't think it was available for many years and subsequently forgotten. This was the debut film from writer-director John Byrum, who was a more accomplished writer than director, and who would go on to make a couple of admirable disappointments, Heart Beat and the Bill Murray co-written Razor's Edge, which have a lot of ambition but only…

Maybe the biggest cultural anachronism here is the complete lack of any semblance of internet technology, not one cell phone in sight. This might prove disorienting to audiences expecting a contemporary allegroy, but it requires adjusting to an alternate timeline in this fantasy setting, which still relies on its Roman precedent as well as the industrial touchstones from the 20th Century - the 20s, the 50s, the 80s - and assuming that in the absence of any internet technology what…

And they said a comic book film could never win an Oscar.

It's appropriate and applaudable for a modern film to confront the millennial crisis of the declining sense of meaning in our culture. The problem with EEAAO is that it also happens to be exactly the kind of emotionally contrived empty-calorie entertainment product that is exactly the problem with this malnourishment of meaning. The philosophy is as paper-thin as its consumerist pop culture tropes and its juvenile surrealism (hot…