“There is nothing left for us here,” Felicity Jones’s character writes to Adrian Brody’s at the start of The Brutalist. “Go to America and I will follow you.” In Brady Corbet’s sweeping new film, the actors portray Erzsébet and László Tóth, a married couple separated by the Holocaust and reunited in the United States, where they must rebuild their lives amid lingering trauma and the trials of a new world. Back in Budapest, László was a successful architect and Erzsébet an Oxford-educated foreign-affairs correspondent. But over the 13 years of Corbet’s narrative, László faces rejection and discrimination, while Erzsébet contends with condescension and the toll of a husband who is addicted to heroin—the consequence of a wartime injury. Justin Chang of The New Yorker calls The Brutalist “an American epic of rare authority.” What gives it power, he writes, “is what lends some buildings their fascination: a quality of dramatic capaciousness and physical weight, a sense that what we’re seeing was formed and shaped by human hands.” —Jeanne Malle