This review won't add much more to what my comrades have pointed out about the movie but I'd like to share my opinion as well because Michael Curtiz is one of a few good directors that made it successfully from silent movies to talkies. Unfortunately, most of his work from his first period is lost, so let's break it down here and now.
Jön az öcsém (My Brother is Coming) isn't only Curtiz's sole surviving Hungarian film but also the last one he made in his native homeland before leaving the country abruptly leaving what would've been the first on screen adaptation of Liliom unfinished. Now, for a 1919 movie Jön az öcsém, put simply, sucks. Its runtime (11 minutes, 3 extra minutes to what the IMDb states) does not set the movie in a competitive position compared to others made at the time in different countries (average runtimes ranked from 50 to 90 minutes, sometimes more, at times less). The best of it is certainly the mise en scène, the tainting and the close-ups. Being all utilized in a very proper way. If you can't read Hungarian, the poem is lost aesthetically in the translation but hey, this is a movie, not a book. So that's no excuse.
This would've been an ambitious movie if made 10 years earlier but by 1919 one could expect much more. Even Griffith's 1910 The Unchanging Sea (also based on a poem, a very short one, to make matters worse for Jön az öcsém) was more ambitious! The actors' lack of experience works against the film as well, but to be honest, it was impossible to get any experienced actors from an industry that had just been born in 1912, when Curtiz's debut film was released. Besides, its propaganda message: workers of the world unite! clearly in accordance to Hungary's newly installed government turned the movie into a political pamphlet.
As a conclusion, Curtiz's talent was a wasted one in Hungary. If this movie ain't more ambitious it's just because the producers wouldn't take any chances. Directors, particularly Curtiz, would always be willing to take things one step further by attempting the more complex projects, the better. The only reason I don't rate it any lower is just because some of the images are beautiful. I'm sorry to say this but this movie is entirely dispensable, even to fans of Curtiz.
Solomon Roth