3/5 stars

Unveiled out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, Wolfs is a comic thriller that skates along primarily thanks to the laid-back bonhomie of its two stars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

These two long-time buddies, who first worked together in Ocean’s Eleven, are back playing rival “cleaners” in this New York-set tale. Both dressed in blacks and greys, uttering the same gnomic phrases, as Austin Abrams’ Kid points out, “You’re, like, basically the same guy.”

Neither Pitt nor Clooney has a name in the film, perhaps because their star power is so enormous we’ll only ever know them as Brad and George.

One chilly night in the Big Apple, Clooney’s fixer is called to a penthouse in a plush hotel by a shaken District Attorney named Margaret (Amy Ryan). In the bedroom is the Kid (Austin Abrams), who she thinks is dead, after he fell and crashed into a drinks trolley. Running a campaign to get tough on crime, the DA knows that if this gets out, it could ruin her.

Then Pitt turns up, it soon emerging he’s been hired by the hotel owner to clean up this mess. With identities compromised, it means that he and Clooney will have to work together, a job that becomes increasingly complicated when a bag of drugs is found and the Kid turns out not to be dead.

As set-ups go, it’s compelling enough, and kicks into gear when Euphoria star Abrams wakes up and makes a bolt for it, in just his underwear, through the freezing cold streets of the city.

You’ll find out next to nothing about the Clooney and Pitt characters, as their shadowy, lone-wolf status dictates. But Watts mines pleasing humour from his veteran A-listers (jokes about fading eyesight), and even includes the Bill Withers classic “Just the two of us” on the soundtrack.

Weighed down by a plot that is entirely secondary – the whole backstory as to why the Kid has a stash of drugs, and who it belongs to, feels almost incidental – Wolfs is the sort of slick, empty-headed entertainment that Hollywood (or in this case Apple) does well enough.

Abrams is charming as the innocent caught up among the high rollers, while Ryan is excellent in her extended cameo. As for Pitt and Clooney, well, they bring the sizzle if not the surprises.

Wolfs will start streaming on Apple TV+ on September 27.

A subject’s charm can take a documentary a long way. That’s the case in Matt Tyrnauer’s latest project, Nobu, a glowing portrait of Nobu Matsuhisa. The Japanese chef is best known for his empire of luxury sushi restaurants (and more recently, hotels), where guests can experience his medley of dishes inspired by his Japanese roots and early foray into Peruvian cuisine. In Nobu, based on Matsuhisa’s memoir of the same name, Tyrnauer (also in Telluride this year with Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid) anchors the global phenom’s name to a personality. 

Nobu is a straightforward and admiring portrait of its subject. The film will likely appeal to fans of the chef (especially since this year marks the 30th anniversary of the first Nobu restaurant), but it may not completely satiate the culinary-curious. Less process-oriented and more wide-ranging than David Gelb’s glossy doc Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Nobu looks at Matsuhisa as a man and a brand, offering bits of biography alongside insights into the chef’s steadily growing empire. 

Tyrnaeur shapes Nobu around lengthy interviews with Matsuhisa, who generously details his early years growing up in Japan, his desire to become a sushi chef and the minor successes and major failures of his early ventures. These conversations, supplemented by interviews with Matsuhisa’s wife, Yoko, and his two daughters, Junko and Yoshiko, form a relatively candid biography and showcase Matsuhisa’s personality. His humor — characterized by Dad jokes and deadpan delivery — enlivens his storytelling and makes the early part of the doc feel more intimate. Stories about Matsuhisa’s formative years reveal a childhood marked by premature grief and a fascination with sushi-making. He likens the process of watching a chef delicately press pieces of fish onto rice and serve it to customers to seeing an actor on stage. To Matsuhisa, sushi is not just a cuisine but a performance. 

When the chef talks about the inspiration for popular dishes like black cod miso or experiments in the kitchen, Nobu nears its full potential as a documentary. Anecdotes about Matsuhisa’s early years in Peru, where he encounters cilantro for the first time, and restaurant ventures in Anchorage and later in Los Angeles affirm the creative thread that undergirds his multi-million dollar business. These moments enrich the portrait with tactical evidence of an artist at work. It’s when we can witness the genius instead of just hearing about it from the film’s various talking heads. A standout sequence comes near the end of the documentary, when Nobu, in a rare move, decides to host close friends at his home in Japan. Here, the chef’s theories about sushi-making as performance are distilled into action. While shaping bits of saltwater eel onto a plate, Matsuhisa regales his guests with jokes and stories about his early culinary days and his more recent ones as an international celebrity. 

And what a star Matsuhisa has become. Tyrnauer dedicates a significant portion of Nobu to the business of running a global conglomerate. With dozens of restaurants worldwide and a handful of hotels, Nobu is now a luxury good. Tyrnauer travels with the chef — always private, rarely commercial — to his various eateries with a special focus on Nobu Los Cabos and Nobu London. He also sits in on board meetings with Matsuhisa and his Nobu co-founders Robert De Niro and Meir Teper, where the trio negotiate expansion deals and visions of the brand’s future. The filmmaking is direct here, focused more on the transfer of information than scoring style points.

Each of Matsuhisa’s restaurants adheres to Nobu’s modus operandi — intimate luxury, quality food — while also using local ingredients to reflect cultural appetites. Tyrnauer includes interviews with writers like Ruth Reichl and chefs like Wolfgang Puck to help map the chef’s influence on the culinary world. Some of these strands are introduced and abandoned at a fast clip, contrasting with the steady pace established in the biographical section.

With so much to cover and such a flattering sheen, the documentary mostly sidesteps areas of potential tension. When the corporate culture is described as familial, questions about labor practices, including some recent-ish lawsuits, are left unaddressed. And a moment of disagreement between De Niro and Teper about the direction of the company — expand rapidly in pursuit of capital or move slowly to maintain high standards — is observed but not assessed. It’s for this reason that Nobu functions best as a primer, a tasting menu for all things Nobu — man and brand.

The past comes to life as a whole enveloping world in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s fine-grained, novelistic third feature as director, about a man of genius who gets to taste the American Dream but also feel the stinging humiliation of a conditional welcome that turns ice-cold. While there are echoes of The Fountainhead, this expansive story of a brilliant Bauhaus-trained Hungarian Jewish architect who survives World War II and starts a new life in Pennsylvania is a provocative original.

Written by Corbet with his partner and regular collaborator Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist is closer to the churning ideas and dark view of power in the director’s debut feature, The Childhood of a Leader, than his more polarizing disquisition on contemporary celebrity, Vox Lux. But it represents a vast leap in scope from both, contemplating such meaty themes as creativity and compromise, Jewish identity, architectural integrity, the immigrant experience, the arrogant insularity of privilege and the long reach of the past.

Reportedly the first American film fully produced in VistaVision since One-Eyed Jacks in 1961, it screens in its Venice Film Festival premiere in 70mm, a giant canvas amply justified by the narrative’s variegated textures.

Running a densely packed three-and-a-half hours, including a built-in intermission with entr’acte, the enthralling movie hands Adrien Brody his best role in years as gifted architect László Tóth, ushered through fortune’s door by a wealthy tycoon eager to bankroll his dream project and then viciously cut down to size when his patron is displeased.

Brody pours himself into the character with bristling intelligence and internal fire, holding nothing back as he viscerally conveys both exultant highs and gutting sorrows. His exacting accent work alone is a measure of his commitment to the audacious project.

The opening jolts us instantly into anxious involvement as László is jostled around in a packed train carriage, the shuddering sound design suggesting the nightmare of his ordeal. Over the turbulent strains of Daniel Blumberg’s mighty score, letters from the architect’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), from whom he was separated during internment, are heard in voiceover, detailing her situation in a displaced-persons camp in Hungary with László’s niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). László is soon on board a ship bound for America, with plans for Erzsébet and Zsófia to follow.

Ellis Island arrival scenes are a staple of immigrant dramas, but the disconcerting angles from which DP Lol Crawley shoots the Statue of Liberty as it looms into view seem to presage both the elation of deliverance and the challenges to come. The blank stares of the assembled passengers barely able to follow instructions in English from port officials provide a haunting image of people for whom freedom comes with fear.

After a quick, and notably graphic, encounter with an immigrant sex worker, László travels to Pennsylvania, capital of industry. He’s warmly reunited with his cousin Attila, played by Alessandro Nivola with subtle indications of a fraternal generosity that has limits. Old-world erasure is evident in his tempered accent, his blonde shiksa wife Audrey (Emma Laird) and in the name of the childless couple’s furniture store, Miller & Sons: “Folks here like a family business.” He even converted to Catholicism before marrying.

Potentially important new client Harry (Joe Alwyn) hires Miller & Sons to redesign the gloomy library in his family’s gated mansion as a surprise for his father, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), away on business. Attila entrusts the project to László, and the architect takes on young Black single father Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé), whom he met on a mission breadline, as a construction hand. The architect’s perfectionism causes delays, but the resulting transformation creates a retreat of serenity and light, with the room’s valuable collection of first editions cleverly protected from damage.

Van Buren Sr.’s reaction is not the surprise his son intended. Unimpressed with the new library, he’s furious to find his house turned upside-down and “a Negro man” on his property, dismissing the contractors in a fit of bellowing rage.

When Harry refuses to pay due to roof damage, Attila blames his cousin. Audrey has already been nudging László to move out since a supposed transgression during a drunken evening at home. Attila uses that tension as further justification to kick him out. He lands in a shelter with Gordon, taking construction work to get by and using opium to numb the pain of his war injuries.

László is surprised when Harrison turns up at a building site, brandishing a copy of Look magazine with a photo spread calling the library a triumph of minimalist design. The industrialist has a folder of research on the architect, including photos of notable proto-brutalist buildings he designed before the war. Given that the Reich deemed the work of László and his colleagues “un-Germanic,” he’s moved almost to tears, having assumed all photographs were destroyed.

That scene is one of several in which László’s emotional response to architecture points to the director’s kindred passion for the art form in relation to its time. The fictional protagonist was partly inspired by the life of Marcel Breuer, with Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe also among Corbet and Fastvold’s references.

Harrison sends a car for László the following Sunday when he’s just staggering home from a night of excess; he finds himself at a formal luncheon, where a Jewish lawyer offers to help get Erzsébet and Zsófia to America. The guests are then instructed to follow Harrison as he marches them in blistering cold to a hilltop overlooking all of Doylestown. He shares his vision for a vast community center to be designed by László, who will be installed in a guesthouse on the property while construction is underway.

Financial compensation and artistic opportunity shape a turning point in the story, as does the arrival of Erzsébet and Zsófia, the former physically broken by war and famine and the latter initially rendered mute by the horrors she experienced. But almost from the start, László’s dream project is fraught with difficulties, each one chipping away at his sense of control and his ego.

Having the work overseen by Harry, who makes no effort to disguise his dislike for László, is merely an annoyance at first. But when a contractor and another architect are brought in to assess costs and city-planning representatives start making demands, László feels compelled to cover budget overages out of his own fee. The project is stalled by a rail accident involving a train delivering materials, eliciting a sharp reminder of the rage Harrison displayed at their first meeting.

Tension in the architect’s marriage is released but not resolved in a knockout scene in bed, during which Erzsébet, in perhaps Jones’ strongest moment, reduces László to tears by expressing how well she understands him. She’s supportive but not subjugated, chafing at the way he shuts her out of decisions affecting all three of them. As she puts it later, “László worships only at the altar of himself.”

While a degrading incident between Harry and Zsófia plays out offscreen, it doesn’t slip by László, and though the matter is never discussed, it foreshadows a shocking development years later, after work on the project has resumed. That climactic moment happens in Italy, where Harrison accompanies László to the marble quarries in the mountains of Carrera.

In an extraordinarily beautiful passage of writing, Orazio (Salvatore Sansone), a friend and associate from before the war, shares his deep feelings about marble and its significance to his time as a Resistance fighter, about the weight of the geological miracle both in European history and foundational America. That such a moving declaration precedes strung-out László’s brutal debasement only amplifies its shattering wallop.

The Van Burens are revealed to be the quintessence of moral corruption bred by wealth and power; only Harry’s twin sister Maggie (Stacy Martin) seems to value genuine kindness. The Brutalist becomes a scathing critique of the ways in which America’s moneyed and privileged class gains cachet through the labor and creativity of immigrants but will never consider them equals.

Despite Harrison’s big pronouncements on the responsibility of the rich to nurture the great artists of their time, he’s a cultural gatekeeper in an exclusionary club. Despising weakness, he ultimately cuts László down to size with a pitilessness that in hindsight seems preordained from that first encounter.

Brody has seldom been better, bringing tremendous gravitas but also a pain that gnaws at László’s prideful sense of self, one of purpose and destiny. It’s a towering performance; seeing the architect treated like garbage is crushing.

Jones’ role appears almost marginal at first, but the character grows in stature and forcefulness as the clear-sighted Erzsébet — lonely, unwelcomed and toiling away at a job that’s beneath her — makes a damning assessment of America and their place in it while her husband cracks under pressure. Alwyn does some of his best work, making Harry contemptible without veering into caricature. But the supporting cast’s real standout is Pearce in commandingly chilly form. Harrison is a visionary like László, but his practiced charm is undercut by an absence of humanity.

The movie is dedicated to the memory of composer Scott Walker, who died in 2019 and who scored Corbet’s previous films. Blumberg’s stirring work honors him with subtle echoes, also evoking comparison at times with the jagged edges of Mica Levi or the solemn grandeur of Terence Blanchard.

Editor David Jancso threads the sprawling story with a flow that pulls us along, incorporating archival material for historical context. And Crawley’s cinematography is magnificent, never more so than when prowling the mausoleum-like halls of the unfinished project or the tunnels of Carrera. Together with production designer Judy Becker and costumer Kate Forbes, the DP shows an attentive eye for detail, conjuring the look of midcentury America with a period verisimilitude that feels alive, never frozen in amber.

The Brutalist is a massive film in every sense, closing with a resonant epilogue that illustrates how art and beauty reach out from the past, transcending space and time to reveal a freedom of thought and identity often denied its makers.