Like architecture itself, 'The Brutalist' is an epic exercise in ambition and grandeur

"The making of a good building," observed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, "is a great moral performance."

- AP

Like many notable quotes about architecture, it speaks to grandeur, permanence, scale. One imagines László Tóth, the visionary Hungarian architect who escaped the Holocaust and sailed to the United States to find his American Dream, would heartily agree.

But don't go looking on Wikipedia. Tóth, played with deep soul and unrelenting intensity by Adrien Brody in "The Brutalist," is actually fictional, though you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, so richly realized is his story in director Brady Corbet's audacious new film. Though not for everyone, it's a film that can justifiably be described as "epic" in ambition and design. And, wouldn't you know, ambition and design are precisely what the movie's about.