The first reviews for Megalopolis, the latest movie from The Godfather and Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, are in after its Cannes premiere – and critics are divided, to say the least.
The sci-fi drama had been a long-time passion project for the filmmaker, who poured $120 million of his own money into production. It stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, an architect with the ability to control time, who’s trying to rebuild the city of New Rome into a utopia after it’s destroyed in an accident. He’s faced with several obstacles, though, including a corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) and a love interest with torn loyalties (Nathalie Emmanuel). The cast also includes Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jason Schwartzman, Laurence Fishburne, and Talia Shire.
Megalopolis premiered at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday (May 16) and critics are currently split almost entirely down the middle – the movie has a score of 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. According to our own two-star review, the movie is “almost so bad it’s good” and “has its moments – if you decide not to take it seriously.”
According to Vulture, though, “Megalopolis might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy every single batshit second of it,” while Variety writes that “Megalopolis is anything but lazy, and while so many of the ideas don’t pan out as planned, this is the kind of late-career statement devotees wanted from the maverick, who never lost his faith in cinema.”
The Guardian‘s review, however, says that the movie “is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future,” and Vanity Fair writes that it’s “the junkiest of junk-drawer movies, a slapped together hash of Coppola’s many disparate inspirations. What really tanks the movie, though, is its datedness.”
Per Rolling Stone, however, “it is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make – uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic, broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones.”
Megalopolis doesn’t have a release date yet. While we wait for Coppola’s latest to hit the big screen, check out our guide to this year’s biggest upcoming movies.
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