“GOOD ARCHITECTURE should always be applauded,” a foppish Roman says early on in Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect (1987). In Megalopolis and The Brutalist, there is no architecture to applaud (an odd thing to do in any event, as Greenaway underscores)—only architects. You haven’t heard of them before these movies, but you already know them: iridescing egoists in the Howard Roark mold, fingering grease pencils and T-squares and prone to obliquities of speech easily mistaken for profundity. Hailed by fickle paymasters as the bringers of new epochs, they are just as soon punished for the impudence of their gifts, more readily stated than shown. Then: confirmations of overcoming, diegetic displays of approbation, cut to black.
Megalopolis and The Brutalist (both 2024) are parables of the madness of creation. Here, personifications of pure, uncut genius square up against philistinism and its legion of jowly middlemen. One film was made by an eccentric filmmaker long in the tooth and with money to burn, the other by a disaffected young actor turned director. Au…