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‘Bafflingly shallow’ or ‘staggeringly ambitious’? Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis splits critics
Coppola’s passion project screens at Cannes film festival to seven-minute standing ovation, but reviews have been polarising
Megalopolis, which screened at Cannes on Thursday night to a seven-minute standing ovation, was once considered a pipe dream for its years of false starts and abandoned shoots as well as its baroque, borderline unfilmable premise about “political ambition, genius and conflicted love” where “the fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems”. The New Yorker described Megalopolis as “aggressively heady, stubbornly illogical, and beguilingly optimistic” in a review that praised its “stunningly poignant pleasures” – including side characters played by Laurence Fishburne and Coppola’s sister Talia Shire. The film “doesn’t show us the future of cinema so much as it galvanises our desire to ensure it has one”, wrote critic David Ehrlich, who also called Megalopolis a “transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire”.
Or read this on The Guardian
