For a week, I have been back in Blighty, staying in Lytham, slipping into old habits like a well-worn coat. And one such habit—one that has never left me—is the simple pleasure of sitting in a darkened cinema

For a week, I have been back in Blighty, staying in Lytham, slipping into old habits like a well-worn coat. And one such habit—one that has never left me—is the simple pleasure of sitting in a darkened cinema

For a week, I have been back in Blighty, staying in Lytham, slipping into old habits like a well-worn coat. And one such habit—one that has never left me—is the simple pleasure of sitting in a darkened cinema

There is something deeply reassuring about the rituals of returning home—though home, in this case, is not quite Lancaster, where I spent nearly 40 years, but the North of England itself. The familiar damp air rolling in from the Irish Sea, the clipped, no-nonsense greetings of shopkeepers, the sense of place so deeply entrenched it almost feels as if the land itself remembers you.

For a week, I have been back in Blighty, staying in Lytham, slipping into old habits like a well-worn coat. And one such habit—one that has never left me—is the simple pleasure of sitting in a darkened cinema, the flickering light of the screen illuminating the possibilities of story. The Island Cinema in St Anne’s, with its unpretentious charm and the comforting hum of a small, devoted audience, has become my sanctum. A place where I can sit among strangers and feel a quiet, shared reverence for the art of storytelling.

I came here as a film lover, yes, but also as someone who once studied film, who now seeks to transform life into narrative, working on ideas that will one day make their way into scripts, into images, into something that lives beyond the page. In the past two days, I have taken in Maria and A Complete Unknown, both leaving their imprint. And today, The Brutalist—a film thick with history, pain, and the uneasy tension between art and patronage.

Adrien Brody’s László Tóth is a man whose pain is so close to the surface, you can almost see the raw nerve endings. A Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained architect, he arrives in post-war America with his talent intact but little else. Antisemitism clings to him like a second skin, even within his own family. His American cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), offers him a job and a bed, but the bed is in a warehouse storeroom, and the job is conditional—on Tóth keeping his foreignness, his Jewishness, discreet.

His first encounter with industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) is disastrous. Tóth is chased from Van Buren’s mansion after an impromptu redesign of the library, a project spearheaded by Van Buren’s children. But when an architecture journal takes notice, Van Buren reconsiders. In a moment of impulsive grandeur, he commissions Tóth to design a vast, multi-purpose community space, a monument to his own benevolence, perched on the crest of a Pennsylvania hill.

But patronage is rarely given without strings, and The Brutalist is astute in its exploration of what it means to be an artist at the mercy of a benefactor. The tension builds—Tóth’s vision begins to eclipse even his own moral compass. His shrewd, sharp-eyed wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), only enters the story in the second half—delayed, like an intermission, a deliberate withholding. And when she does, the film takes a darker turn, forcing Tóth to reckon with the cost of his ambition.

Visually, The Brutalist is a film of formidable presence. Shot almost entirely on VistaVision—a widescreen format last widely used in the early 1960s—it feels like a relic of another cinematic age, a time when scale and grandeur were stitched into the very fabric of filmmaking. And perhaps that, more than anything, was what transported me. Watching it unfold in VistaVision was not just an aesthetic bonus; it was a portal. A time machine to my childhood in Malaya, where I sat, wide-eyed, in grand colonial cinemas watching the great sweeping epics of Hollywood’s golden age—Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia. Films that demanded patience, that unfolded like vast murals, their intermissions not a pause but an invitation to reflect before the next act.

Some audiences will see The Brutalist projected in 70mm, an immersive experience that elevates it beyond mere narrative into something akin to architectural spectacle. But even without the grand projection, the film’s cinematography is restless, questioning, never allowing us to settle. Lol Crawley’s camera moves like an interrogator, capturing the starkness of Tóth’s world, the cold precision of his creations.

Yet it is Daniel Blumberg’s score that lifts the film into something almost mythic. His music soars, a hymn to resilience, to creation against all odds. It carries the weight of history, of exile, of longing, and yet it refuses to surrender to despair.

Seeing Carrara’s gleaming marble quarries unfold on the vast VistaVision screen of The Brutalist was like stumbling upon a piece of home in the midst of cinema’s grand illusion. The film transported me across time and space, yet here was a place I could practically touch—a landscape so close to San Romano in Garfagnana, my own corner of Tuscany. The breathtaking whiteness of the mountains, Michelangelo’s sacred stone, the whispered echoes of history and revolution—all of it felt like a love letter to the country I now call home. To hear the Italian caretaker recount tales of resistance, to watch Tóth and Van Buren wander through mist-shrouded caves, was to be reminded of the intoxicating depth of Italian culture: beauty carved from brutality, art born from struggle, language that sings even in its silences. In that moment, watching in the darkness of an English cinema, I felt the magnetic pull of Italy—the land, its stories, its impossible, poetic grandeur—woven into the very marrow of my being.

As the credits rolled, I sat in the dark, the film’s imagery still etched behind my eyes. Tóth’s journey—his compromises, his triumphs, his defeats—lingered, forcing reflection.

There is a reason I return to these stories, why I sit in this small cinema in a corner of England and absorb them like a pilgrim seeking something unnameable. It is because storytelling, at its best, is a form of architecture—building meaning, creating spaces for us to inhabit, even if only for a fleeting moment. And perhaps, like Tóth, like all who create, I am drawn to the idea that what we build—whether in stone or in words—will outlast us.

The Island Cinema emptied around me, the North Sea air waiting outside. I stepped into the night, carrying with me not just the weight of the film but the quiet certainty that stories, in all their brutal, beautiful forms, remain the foundation on which we stand.