Another very, very The long film is here, after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival it was greeted with a flood of exaggerations that could have filled the Grand Canal: The BrutalistBrady Corbet’s third feature film after his psychodrama about a pop star and a school shooter starring Natalie Portman (seriously, watch it) VoxLux. It is 215 minutes long. Over three and a half hours. Such is its enormous length that it was shown at the festival with a 15-minute intermission, a move that may incur the wrath of film fundamentalists but is warmly welcomed by the British Chiropractic Association.

If the reviews are to be believed, it’s worth the numb butt. For example, his five-star review states: The TelegraphRobbie Collin compares it to canonized American epics like Once upon a time in America And Blood will flow. The Hollywood Reporter calls it a “monumental symphony of the immigrant experience.” But what is The Brutalist actually, you ask? To sum it up in less than 215 characters: Holocaust survivor László Toth, a visionary Hungarian architect played by Adrien Brody, builds a new life for himself in an emerging America, where he is supported by a mysterious benefactor played by Guy Pearce. That said, thematically, the film makes great swings – not least in looking at the American dream through the eyes of a postwar immigrant – with Toth’s 30 years of life following his arrival at Ellis Island.

So the scope is ambitious and the size appropriate, as is the case with films whose running times exceed the three-hour mark. This isn’t an 80-minute slasher about rich kids being slaughtered in a remote mansion, or an escapist buddy comedy starring The Rock – Corbet asks us to engage with the work, use our minds and think about what his images say about the myth of America. With such solid reviews and the support of critics calling it a modern classic, it will likely be among the Oscar favorites. But it also arrives at a moment of debate about the perceived overlength of many films. Just last year, the likes of Martin Scorsese’s Killer of the Flower Moon (three hours 26 minutes), Napoleon (two hours 38 minutes, with a nearly three-and-a-half hour director’s cut now streaming) and even the later Oscar winner Oppenheimer (exactly three hours) Opinions differ about the running times.

During the press conference for The Brutalist In Venice on Sunday, Corbet dismissed the debate about the running time as a nuisance. “I actually think it’s quite silly to talk about the running time, because that’s like criticizing a book for having 700 pages instead of 100,” he said. For him, it’s about “how much story there is to tell.”

Quite right. While the debate about long film running times has become louder over the last half decade, no doubt fuelled by the rise of auteur epics such as Scorsese’s Murderer And The IrishmanQuentin Tarantino’s slow-paced LA period piece Once upon a time… in Hollywoodand underrated delights like Ari Asters Beau is afraidthe real point is often lost: whether the said running time is justified or not. And it often was. I for one would have stayed an extra hour to hang out with Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio in what is increasingly being considered Tarantino’s best film of the century. Both Murderer And The Irishman are consistently captivating, elegiac masterpieces, even if they demand a little more of our attention than your average blockbuster. And 180 minutes of film hardly stopped Oppenheimer from winning film awards – and raking in nearly a billion dollars at the box office worldwide.