5 Best Adrien Brody Movies to Watch Before the Oscars This Week

Adrien Brody has remained the industry’s darling ever since he became the youngest nominee to win Best Actor at the 2003 Oscars ceremony, and he might become the big winner once again this year.

The actor is currently the frontrunner for his role in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and will compete with A Complete Unknown’s Timothée Chalamet this Sunday.

The upcoming ceremony marks Brody’s second Academy Award nomination and, most likely, his second win; however, the actor’s filmography goes way beyond some nods from prestigious awards, and many of Brody’s previous movies are in no way less worthy than his performances in The Brutalist.

King of the Hill (1993)

Paving the way for his first ever Oscar nomination and later win, King of the Hill was released 10 years prior and came as one of the first movies where Brody starred in a leading role.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the film follows Jesse Bradford’s Aaron, a young boy separated from his family during the Great Depression somewhere in St. Louis. King of the Hill was widely praised for its storyline and character development, eventually landing 91% of favorable reviews from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

Woody Allen ’s charming story that brought Owen Wilson one of the best roles in his movie career, Midnight in Paris also stars Adrien Brody in a smaller, though not less impressive role.

The movie primarily follows Wilson’s aspiring author Gil who, seeking some inspiration for his debut novel, travels to Paris with his fiancee and suddenly gets transported to the Parisian past, meeting some quite famous figures of the era.

The film sees Brody as Spanish artist Salvador Dali, an extravagant and pretty unexpected role for the actor which the latter, however, nails easily.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Another epic story with a 3-hour runtime in Brody’s filmography, The Thin Red Line is also another powerful message about the horrors of war and its consequences that those in the frontline have to go through.

The movie has a star-studded cast that, apart from Brody himself, comprises Sean Penn, George Clooney, Ben Chaplin, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson and John Travolta, and is still considered one of the best films directed by Terrence Malick.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Adrien Brody has been a frequent collaborator of Wes Anderson and so far has starred in 5 of his movies, but The Grand Budapest Hotel is still one of the director’s most ambitious projects to-date.

Released back in 2014, the comedy drama follows Ralph Fiennes’ Monsieur Gustave H., an already legendary concierge of a 20th-century mountainside resort in a fictional country of Zubrowka, who gets wrongly accused of murdering a wealthy dowager.

The rest of the cast is also impressive, as the movie stars Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Léa Seydoux, Tilda Swinton and Owen Wilson.

The Pianist (2002)

Even compared to Brody’s monumental work in The Brutalist, his performance in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist remains the most powerful one in his entire career.

The movie stars Brody as Władysław Szpilman, a Polish Jewish pianist separated from his family as he tries to survive in Warsaw occupied by Germany during World War II.

The Pianist eventually brought Brody his first Oscar, though he later confessed to struggling with PTSD and not being able to take on other roles for several following years after the film was released.