What's Brutal is the Length

Film: The Brutalist
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on various players.

If you are me and you start watching The Brutalist, you take a step back when you hear the name of the main character, Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). For most people, that name doesn’t mean a lot, but for me, there’s an immediate connection. Comedian Don Novello, best known for his character Father Guido Sarducci, wrote a couple of books where he played a character named Lazlo Toth. This version of Lazlo Toth wrote earnest (and ridiculous) letters to companies and famous people. Seeing someone with essentially the same name in a serious movie was a bit jarring.

It took me several days to get through The Brutalist. The version on HBO is truncated only in the sense that instead of a 15-minute intermission, there’s a 1-minute intermission. It’s still more than 200 minutes with the shorter intermission, and that’s a lot to ask from an audience for any film in one sitting. I do wonder about the necessity of the length. Film critic Mark Kermode tends to reference 2001 in a case like this—in that film, Kubrick takes use from the birth of humanity to the birth of a new species in about 2 ½ hours. In The Brutalist, we take nearly 3 ½ hours to look at the story of a fictional architect.

It's a Miracle!

Film: Wake Up Dead Man
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I genuinely enjoy the regularity of the Knives Out franchise. Based on the past decade, we’ll get a new film in the franchise around the end of 2028. The latest one, called Wake Up Dead Man hits all of the points that we got from the original Knives Out. The script is dynamite, the mystery is a good one and yet completely solvable (I guessed right), and the cast is a who’s who of modern Hollywood.

This time, and for the first time in three films, the person who is being falsely accused of a murder is a man, and a priest, no less. Former boxer and new Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) has been relegated to a backwater parish in upstate New York as his first official appointment as a priest. He is in the position of assisting Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wicks is prickly and demanding, abusive and rude. He’s also heading a cult of personality of local parishioners, all of whom have their own foibles and dependence on Wicks.

Maybe Androids Dream of Murder

Film: Companion
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on massive television.

I can’t say that Black Mirror has ruined science fiction, but it has certainly changed the perception of it a great deal. Modern science fiction that touches on themes of the dangers of technology and near-future cyberpunk feels like a Black Mirror episode. That’s definitely the case with Companion. This is a near-future story that is absolutely about AI and promised technology and exactly how it can go wrong.

This is also a case where some of the major plot points are clearly revealed in the trailer. Josh (Jack Quaid) and his girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) go for a weekend get-together with friends. Included are couple Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage), Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri), and Kat’s boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend). It’s clear that Kat is not a fan of Iris, and also that Sergey is someone who doesn’t treat her very well. Sergey hints that he has connections to some dark and unsavory people; the amount of money he clearly has backs this up.

The Fountain of Salmacis

Film: Together (2025)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on massive television.

The trailer for Together from 2025 doesn’t really hide what is going to happen in this film, or at least it hints pretty heavily toward a particular main plot. Even the cover art on the disc combined with the name are going to lead your thoughts in specific directions. For someone like me, who frequently likes to analogize, I’m in a quandary. There are so many different allusions and connections I can make to books, music, and other movies that I was at least temporarily overwhelmed by the possibilities.

That said, if I can find a way to both reference my earliest prog rock musical roots and a more obscure Greek myth, I’m a happy dude. The issue here for me was the fact that I knew where the film was going before I put the disc in the spinner. The trailer gives it away, as does the cover of the DVD. That being the case, this becomes more about how the story is told rather than where the story is going.

Wait...It Has a Plot?

Film: Tenebrae
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

I’ve long had a sort of love-hate relationship with Dario Argento and the giallo style in general for years. Argento’s films are all about the style and often light on substance. My knock against him has been, for years, that it feels like a lot of his films come from his visualization of a couple of outstanding scenes, and the rest of the movie is made to connect them. For as good a visual masterpiece as Suspiria is, it does seem like it started from the stabbing/hanging death and the barbed wire room and went from there. This is much less the case for Tenebrae (Tenebre in Italian, evidently), where there is an actual plot. That’s a low bar, but for gialli it’s a necessary one.

True to the style, Tenebrae is a horror movie in the guise of a mystery. Horror author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) has come to Rome on his latest book tour, promoting a book called Tenebrae. Coming with him on the trip are his assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi) and his agent Bullmer (John Saxon). He will eventually discover that his ex-fiancée Jane (Veronica Lario) has followed him to Rome as well. What Neal doesn’t know is that just before he arrived, a young shoplifter named Elsa (Ania Pieroni) has been brutally murdered.

What I've Caught Up With, November 2025

I didn’t watch a lot of movies in November. I’ve been more or less struggling to return to normalcy in my own life, and that’s meant finding ways to disconnect from things that have been stressing me out. In some odd ways, this blog can be a real stressor—trying to keep up with films and catch up with films has me constantly feeling like I am always behind. That’s silly, but we put stress on ourselves in different ways and for different reasons all the time.

I spent far more time catching up on TV shows, although I only finished a couple. I did a rewatch of the NetFlix/Disney Daredevil since I realized I had never seen the third season. I also watched Helstrom, which is the one Marvel-based show you can easily skip if you decide to watch all of the Marvel content. My wife decided she wants to watch the new Dexter, so we temporarily have a Paramount account; I’m using this as an opportunity to finally watch Twin Peaks.

Madden NFL 2025

Film: Him
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on massive television.

Movies like Him present a problem for me. I generally only do a full review of a movie from the last few years if I think it’s worth the time and effort, and Him isn’t. But I also know that the They Shoot Zombies list is still being updated pretty much every year, and there’s a non-zero chance that this will show up on it in the future. It shouldn’t, but it is better than some of the movies that have made that list. And, honestly, it’s not a movie I necessarily want to watch a second time. I don’t say this to dissuade anyone from watching on their own. Him has a lot of promise; it just doesn’t fulfill that promise.

This is very much a sports movie, and it’s one that revels in the idea of football as a sort of religion. That’s a fair position to take. It is close to a religion for a lot of people, and as someone who still lives in the shadow of Chicago where the Bears are resurgent, it feels like a lot of people are seeing the light. But it’s not just “football as religion” that makes the film go. This is football as cult, and it gets into some pretty culty places.