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BRIAN VINER reviews The Brutalist: Tipped for an Oscar, this movie is full of grandeur and great acting

There is no swerving the irony that The Brutalist, a sweeping drama about the American immigrant experience, lands in cinemas in the very week that the 47th President of the United States starts.

Once Van Buren hires him to design a mighty community centre named after his beloved late mother, Toth’s American Dream seems complete, despite the sly enmity of his patron’s entitled and supercilious son Harry (Joe Alwyn). All this unfolds absorbingly, but the narrative takes an unwelcome lurch sideways following that blessedly welcome intermission when, thanks to the Displaced Persons Act and some string-pulling by Van Buren, Toth’s osteoporosis-stricken wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy), an elective mute, join him in America. A US marshal (Michelle Dockery, striving admirably to erase all traces of Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary) must escort a vital witness (Topher Grace) in a case against a mob boss, by air from Alaska to Seattle.

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