Francis Ford Coppola Debuts ‘Megalopolis’ at Cannes, and the Reviews Are in

Francis Ford Coppola Debuts 'Megalopolis' at Cannes, and the Reviews Are in

**EDS: Image VIA @malaimarejr_cinematography; Follow the story** Los Angeles: The first official image from filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola’s film ‘Megalopolis’, which will premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. (PTI Photo) (PTI05_01_2024_000030B) | photo Credit: –

Francis Ford Coppola premiered his self-financed masterpiece “Megalopolis” at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, unveiling a wildly ambitious passion project the 85-year-old director has been mulling over for decades.

Reviews ranged from “huge stupidity” to “craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” But most certainly, once again, Coppola got everyone at Cannes talking.

No debut was more eagerly awaited at Cannes this year than “Megalopolis,” in which Coppola invested $120 million of his own money after selling a portion of his wine estate. Unlike Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” nearly 45 years earlier, “Megalopolis” was followed by rumors of production turmoil and doubts over its potential appeal.

What Coppola unveils defies easy categorization. It is a fable about an architect (Adam Driver) in future New York who has a grand vision of a more harmonious metropolis, and whose remarkable talents include the ability to start and stop time. Although “Megalopolis” is set in the near future, it is structured as a Roman epic. Driver’s character is named Caesar and the New York of the film involves a modern Coliseum.

The cast includes Aubrey Plaza as an ambitious TV journalist named Wow Platinum, Giancarlo Esposito as the Mayor, Laurence Fishburne as Caesar’s driver (and the film’s narrator), and Shia LaBeouf as an obnoxious cousin named Claudio. Are.

Coppola, wearing a straw hat and holding a walking stick, walked the Cannes carpet on Thursday, often clinging to the arm of his granddaughter, Romy Coppola Mars, while the soundtrack to “The Godfather” played over the festival’s loudspeakers.

After the screening, the Cannes audience gave a prolonged standing ovation for Coppola and the film. Ultimately the director took the microphone to emphasize the ultimate meaning of his film.

Coppola told the crowd, “We are one human family and that is what we must pledge our allegiance to.” He said that esperanza is “the most beautiful word in the English language” because it means hope.

Many reviews were extremely poor. Peter Bradshaw, writing for The Guardian, called it “megabloated and megaboring”. Tim Grierson for Screen Daily called it a “disaster” “hampered by arbitrary plotting and numbing excesses”. Kevin Maher, writing for the Times of London, called it a “head-smackingly disgusting incident”. Critic Jessica Kiang said that “Megalopolis” is “foolishness of such a scale that it’s like watching the literal fall of Rome.”

But some critics responded by praising the film’s ambition. With affection, New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri said the film “may be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” David Ehrlich for IndieWire praised the “creatively unconstrained approach” that “may not result in a surplus of dramatically coherent scenes, but it brings a looseness to the whole film that makes it nearly impossible to look away.”

“Whether it is a far-fetched act of arrogance, a colossal stupidity, or a bold experiment, an imaginative attempt to capture our chaotic contemporary reality, both political and social, through big-canvas, high-concept storytelling Which is rarely attempted now? ” wrote David Rooney for The Hollywood Reporter. “The truth is that it is all of these things.”

“Megalopolis” is dedicated to the director’s wife, Eleanor Coppola, who died last month.

Coppola is looking for a distributor for “Megalopolis”. Before its premiere, the film was acquired for some European territories. IMAX chief executive Richard Gelfond said “Megalopolis” – which Coppola believes is best seen on IMAX – will run globally on the company’s large-format screens.

In several places in “Megalopolis”, Coppola, who once wrote the book “Live Cinema and Its Techniques”, pushes against filmmaking tradition experimentally. At a screening on Thursday, Jason Schwartzman emerged midway through the film, walked up to the microphone on stage and asked Driver’s character on the screen above a question.

Several weeks before Cannes, Coppola screened “Megalopolis” privately in Los Angeles. It quickly became clear that many people were confused by the experimental film they had just seen. “There are zero business prospects there and that’s good for him,” one attendee told Puck.

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