Review: John Wilson pours it in place

You might think of John Wilson’s verité documentary “The History of Concrete,” which opened in L.A. and New York last week and expands to several more cities today, as the third installment in an accidental architectural trilogy. First came “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet’s grandiose ode to a Marcel Breuer-like protagonist who is trying to finish a giant hilltop complex of concrete buildings outside Philadelphia, despite the best efforts of philistines and unreliable contractors to grind his towering dreams to gravel. Next was “Architecton,” the Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky’s droning study of mass and materiality across architectural history, which starts in a Turkish quarry and concludes with an unconvincing sermon, in a garden overlooking a Lombard lake, about the ugliness of contemporary concrete architecture.

Wilson’s film, his feature debut following three seasons and 18 episodes of “How To with John Wilson,” the sleeper hit of a series he wrote and directed for HBO, shares with the two earlier films a fascination with every detail of concrete construction. (Three movies about concrete hitting theaters in a span of 22 months: who would’ve guessed?) In almost every other way—tonally, visually, in its narrative construction—it is a different cinematic animal.