Even though it also concerns an architect fighting entrenched elites to achieve his singular vision, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist doesn’t bow before the altar of The Fountainhead. Yet he takes a gauntlet thrown down early in King Vidor’s 1949 film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel—no place originally exists in architecture, and the past cannot be improved upon—more seriously than either Vidor or Rand. Corbet’s epic, like Adrien Brody’s László Toth, remains unconcerned with choosing between honoring the past and catering to the present. László instead seeks to transcend time altogether, thus equipping his artistry to endure well into the future.

Corbet’s multi-decade survey of post-war America captures the sweeping scope of the novelistic period epics of the studio era, which embodied the cultural might of the United States as it asserted dominance across the globe. But The Brutalist rises above simple pastiche or homage.