How “The Brutalist” Tries to Rewrite American Jewish History

Normally this newsletter wouldn’t link to two separate articles reviewing the same movie, but a writer like Edward Rothstein reviewing a much-praised film like The Brutalist is something that demands attention. Rothstein praises the acting and the score of this film about the career of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, Laszlo Toth, as an architect in America, and praises the director for the film’s ambition and scope. Yet he finds the film marred by its muddled understanding of its subject—modern architecture—as well as its ideological agenda, which “reinforces so many contemporary mythologies that caricature the American dream as a nightmare.”