Megalopolis

Francis Coppola’s self-funded, self-styled new Roman epic — set in a futuristic city that looks a lot like New York — has garnered reviews from right across the spectrum, from pans to raves. And it deserves them all. It’s a crazily ambitious folly, a wildly audacious swing, a movie unlike anything else you might have seen before, and one that maybe only works in fits and starts. It’s inspiring and infuriating, funny, earnest, avant-garde and almost naive. In most other art forms, there is a place for reinvention and experimentation. In American movies, these things tend to meet with suspicion and derision. Megalopolis is a movie about the present moment — about a decadent Establishment on the verge of eating itself — that dares to imagine a brighter future. It’s a film full of ideas, and sentiment, satire and play. Go with it, see where it takes you.

A brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Megalopolis might be Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project, an epic of ambition and imagination, but it is also a magnificent mess of a masterpiece, as irredeemably silly as it is sincerely sublime.

Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

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.

Bilge Eberi, New York Magazine