How can a film simultaneously emerge as the Oscar frontrunner while sparking pointed discussions about architectural history, technology, and cultural insensitivity? This is precisely what The Brutalist has triggered lately. The 3 -hour cinematic epic from director Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody has thrilled audiences and is increasingly racking up the hatred within the architecture media while dipping into some unexpected zeitgeist controversies along the way. On January 5, the Golden Globe awards for best film, director, and actor all went to The Brutalist. Its production company A24, began the larger rollout of the film January 24 after a limited release to garner awards interest. The consensus, among film critics, at least, was that the film amounted to a masterpiece, according to sources including The Arizona Republic, Rolling Stone, and #movietok. (It certainly did better than Francis Ford Coppolas Megalopolis.) ANs own review called it an alluring bricolage of 20th-century, avant-garde architects and architecture.Public interest in Brutalist architecture has surged in the days and weeks after the Golden Globes victories, earning a 100 score on Google Trends (it usually rates a tepid 16 out of 100) right after the ceremony and hovering in the 80s since. In other words: The architecture world must surely be thrilled that a movie was making people interested in a historical yet still-meaningful topic within their industry, right? Wrong.Though the film has Las Vegas oddsmakers convinced it will win on Hollywoods biggest night (Sunday, March 2), it has become a lightning rod for the architectural community and beyond, and how a torrent of subjects directly and indirectly related to The Brutalist sent the seemingly beneficent headwinds into a swirl. The Brutalists AI BrouhahaIn mid-January, the films Oscar-nominated editor, Dvid Jancs, in an interview with the video technology publication Red Shark News about why The Brutalist was filmed using the 1960s-era format VistaVision, revealed that Corbet used generative AI to fine-tuned Brodys and costar Felicity Joness accents during the few scenes featuring Hungarian dialogue. (Most of the film features the actors speaking English with Hungarian accents.)When settling in America, Tth is forced to be away from his wife Erzsbet. (Lol Crawley)Jancs also suggested in the interview that the film features renderings of blueprints and completed buildings by architect Lszl Tth, played by Brody, which were partially generated by AI.The outcry forced Corbet to go on an unofficial press tour defending the use of AI in The Brutalist. He issued a statement to the press defending his work with Respeecher, a Ukrainian company specializing in AI voice cloning and spun the story as a feel-good way to honor Hungarian heritage. It was very important to Adrien, Felicity and myself to honour the nation of Hungary by making all of their off-screen Hungarian dialogue absolutely perfect, the director told GQ. Adrien and Felicity had to learn how to speak Hungarian in order for this to work. This technology only allowed us to make dialogue edits so that neither their American or English accents would come through.Corbet went on to deny that Tths buildings and blueprints were AI-generated, saying in a statement that all images were hand drawn by artists. To clarify, in the memorial video featured in the background of a shot, our editorial team created pictures intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980. Brutalism or BustEven before the AI controversy surfaced, architecture critics had begun picking apart The Brutalist for all sorts of transgressions. Foremost was that the story of Tth, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant who arrived in Pennsylvania after World War II, played out like a biopic of famed Bauhaus furniture designer-turned-architect Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian-German Jewish immigrant who came to the United States before the war.As the Oscar buzz mounts, the discussions have become more granular. Writing in The Washington Post, art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott said, Corbets depiction of architecture as a profession is painfully dated, based on a handful of 20th century messianic figures who sought not just to make buildings, but to remake the world. The film, in other words, represents a basic misunderstanding of Brutalist architecture, according to Kennicott. He wrote, For better and worse and often unfairly, architects like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Breuer and Mies van der Rohe (and before them all, Frank Lloyd Wright) inspired the caricatures that still haunt the profession today, especially the idea that the general public is simply not sophisticated enough to understand the beauty of a style that often feels inhuman, austere and aesthetically uncharitable.The film plays out like a biopic of famed Bauhaus furniture designer-turned-architect Marcel Breuer. (Lol Crawley)Thats not the least of its flaws, as the podcast Architecture Writers Anonymous tells it. The three co-hostsCarolina A. Miranda, Mark Lamster, and recent AN Best of Design Awards juror Alexandra Langeissue blunt assessments in the recent episode Why the Brutalist is a Terrible Movie. In the podcasts intro, asked to sum up their feelings about the film, Lamster, architecture critic for Dallas Morning News, said: If the Piano and The Fountainhead had sex, this would be the child. Lange offered: Jewish architect comes to America, encounters capitalism in the form of men in large, double-breasted suits. Miranda dismissed the film as Oscar bait that isnt really about architecture.Architecture Imitates Life?Against the backdrop of The Brutalists rise from cinematic curiosity to Best Picture contender, President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated for his second term, while the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect. In other words, sociopolitical events with connections to the films themes were playing out in real time.This in turn has led to a new wave of criticism for the film. On Substack, New Yorkbased writer and editor Whitney Mallett targeted The Brutalist for its Zionist overtones. Like the architecture critics, Mallett is not pleased with Tths Pinterest understanding of Brutalism, but she is more concerned with bigger crises: Its like, for the past ten years, theres been this fervent reappraisal of Brutalism, Mallett wrote, and now that raw concrete is on everyones moodboards, here comes this big Hollywood epic that co-opts its historical significance premiering at the precise moment when Zionist ideology is fueling a murderous campaign against the people of Gaza. (Its worth pointing out that The Brutalist is not technically a big Hollywood epic, as it reportedly was made on a $10 million budget, a shoestring sum by Hollywood standards.)Meanwhile, as President Trump swept back into office with a flurry of pronouncements, including a rehash of his first administrations admonishment to focus on beautiful federal civic architecture, some onlookers saw it as a rebuke to late modernism and Brutalism, styles that were often used for federal buildings in the capitol, including some by Breuer. Coincidentally, on January 22, Washington, D.C.s National Building Museum extended its Capital Brutalism show through June 30; it was scheduled to conclude February 17.(Lol Crawley)Why are Brutalist aesthetics so captivating today? Disillusionment with the contemporary cant-do American city, where great public-works projects seem a thing of the past, has fostered a rose-tinted view of the old megaprojects, wagered AN contributor Daniel Brook in The Nation. In other words, the style, however misguided, reminds us of an era when U.S. governments still Did Big Things. Whats Next for The Brutalist?Despite the controversies and critiques, The Brutalist continues its march toward the Oscars, where it is nominated in ten categories, including best film, best director, best actor in a leading role, best supporting actor (Guy Pearce, as an industrialist and Tths patron), best supporting actress (Jones), best screenplay, best score, best cinematography, film editing, and production design.This weekend, The Brutalist was named film of the year at the London Critics Circle Film Awards. It is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with a critics consensus of 93% positive reviews, while 80% of the general audience likes it.Guy Pearce earned a nomination for best supporting actor role, playing Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr., a wealthy industrialist. (Lol Crawley)Its box office take continues to rise, with over $18 million internationally including over $12 million domestically only two weeks after its wide release date.Still, while The Brutalist is tracking as the most successful film Hollywood has made about architecture in a long time, its unlikely to earn the type of affection afforded Field of Dreams among baseball cognoscenti, for example.Writing in The Guardian, architecture critic Oliver Wainwright listed his complaints with the film and with Corbet in particular, concluding (spoiler alert!): The architecture world awaits with bated breath the directors five-hour marathons, The Postmodernist, The Deconstructivist, and The Parametricist each to be shot with period-appropriate equipment and based on a brief skim through a coffee-table book.Even with its passing scenes that depict difficult client relations, material selections, and construction-site politics, The Brutalist falls short for many expert architectural observers. What might a blockbuster that more faithfully honors the working tribulations of architects look like? Were still waiting to find out.