Get the latest gossip
Every Francis Ford Coppola Movie, Ranked
Where does Megalopolis fall in the director’s rich filmography?
Shooting a select few sequences in 3-D — the audience is asked, charmingly, to put their glasses on — and the rest in a shadowy, color-drained digital sheen, Coppola casts Val Kilmer as a “bargain-basement” Stephen King who turns a poorly attended small-town book signing into an opportunity to write a local murder mystery that’s still unsolved. Though set in contemporary Buenos Aires, Argentina, where a ship waiter (Alden Ehrenreich) uses a five-day leave to reconcile with his temperamental older brother (Vincent Gallo), Tetro looks like it takes place half a century earlier, thanks to the luminous black-and-white photography, which gives the city a seductive Old World quality. Apocalypse Now functions like a road movie on water: As Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) and his men head down the river to find the rogue Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), Coppola is free to confront them with all the surrealistic detours he can conjure, from blockbuster set pieces like choppers attacking to the sound of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to ghoulish madmen like Robert Duvall’s surf-crazy Kilgore and Dennis Hopper’s drugged-out photojournalist.
Or read this on VULTURE
