'The Brutalist,' 'Nickel Boys' and 'Eephus' stun at the Philadelphia Film Festival

PFF33 starts off with three of the best films of the year.

I did not see Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist at the Philadelphia Film Festival, but rather a month ago at the New York Film Festival, with the belief that a film about Judaism, Philadelphia, and the immigrant experience would be something I’d spend a lot of time writing about this fall. On Saturday night, when it was shown at the Film Society Center, I was watching the clock to see the first reactions from my friends and colleagues.

The Brutalist is the real deal. It’s a more than three-and-a-half-hour epic about László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who comes to America and re-establishes his architecture career, mostly through the Sysiphian job of building a community center for malevolent rich guy Harry Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce.) He’s trying to bring his wife (Felicity Jones) over to the States while also dealing with Van Buren’s Eric Trump-like son (Joe Alwyn.)

Shot in an old-and-new-again filmmaking process called VistaVision, The Brutalist is a visually gorgeous film, albeit one shot at a reported budget of just $10 million or so (it was filmed in Europe, and the production never got anywhere near Philadelphia.)

The Brutalist earns the ultra-long running time with great performances (especially from Brody and Pearce), a story with epic reach and scope, and lots of big ideas. There are about a half-dozen emotionally powerful moments.

It’s a story of the immigrant experience and Jewish assimilation. The film’s relationship to Zionism has already led to some Discourse, even though it’s ultimately a very small part of the film. The epilogue, set decades after the rest of the film, has been divisive in turning a lot of subtext into spoken text, but I thought it made sense.

I didn’t much care for Brady Corbet’s previous film, Vox Lux, when it arrived six years ago, also at PFF. But The Brutalist is a massive achievement. It lands in December, from A24, and I can’t wait to have lots of discussions about it.

Another film that I saw a couple of weeks ago, which landed at PFF this week, was Nickel Boys, the feature directorial debut from RaMell Ross, previously best known for the Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County, This Morning, This Evening.

Working from Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name, Nickel Boys is the story of two Black boys who attended an evil segregated reform school in 1960s Florida. The two boys are Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the film takes something of a radical approach: Their entire stories, before, during and after their time at Nickel, are told from the the boys’ point of view.

This feels like a gimmick, but it’s really not- it’s a nontraditional but extremely effective way of telling this story. There are also numerous flashbacks and flash forwards, most of which feature a heartbreaking turn from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandmother, and it leads up to an ending that’s an absolute gut-punch.

Nickel Boys is set to arrive in December, as part of a pretty ambitious slate this year from Amazon/MGM. Again, this is a bold and nontraditional way to tell this story, but also a glorious one.

One of those films that I heard about from the early festival circuit, starting at Cannes, was Eephus, director Carson Lund’s comedy/drama about the final game of a baseball beer league, in a Massachusetts town, before the field is bulldozed to make room for a new school.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is the obvious inspiration, and I was also reminded of the Ross Brothers’ great Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, which applied the concept to the final night of a Vegas dive bar.

I finally caught the film over at the weekend at PFF, and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, it’s the best new baseball movie in years.

Lund has assembled a fine approximation of what a Massachusetts beer league would look like, including a lot of men who are a lot older, fatter, slower and drunker than what you would think a “baseball player” is.

The trash talk is fantastic, as is the many different things that go wrong- including quite a few things — the ump bailing, the game still tied with daylight running out — that I’ve had happen in my kids’ Little League games. There are lots of fine little details, like one of the teams wearing four different versions of their jersey, since they likely all picked them that day from different years.

The cast is taken up mostly with unknown actors, as well as a couple of bit players from Uncut Gems, and some Boston sports legends. Longtime Red Sox announcer Joe Castiglione has a small part, and ‘70s pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee materalizes, seemingly out of the ether, and disappears just as quickly.

Eephus is set to open in New York next March, with a rollout to follow, so it’s technically a 2025 film. But I could see it becoming a cult hit.