40 2024

Primetime special to celebrate 40 years of CANAL+.

Review

Francis Ford Coppola may sound familiar to some as the director behind some of the most critically acclaimed films of all time, such as The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now.

Despite immense successes, Coppola has not had a theatrical release in over a decade until now with the release of his newest film, Megalopolis.

A brief background of the film reveals that it has been stuck in production limbo for the better part of 40 years.

Coppola financed large parts of it out of his own pocket. With how long it has taken for this film to release, was it worth the wait?

I wish it were a cut-and-dry answer, as Megalopolis has a lot of ideas it is trying to push that could either be viewed as a horrible mess or a stunning bit of creativity.

My feelings fell into the middle where I enjoyed seeing a lot of the weird decisions at play while also acknowledging that it has a lot of problems.

Most of these issues stem from its extremely long production and the fact that it is Coppola’s passion project.

One can assume a lot of decisions made were the result of Coppola attempting to try and tell to many stories at once, trying to do the most he can with this film.

The film follows Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver) as he attempts to rebuild the city of New Rome into a utopian paradise, but the Mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) and criminal forces stand in the way of his vision.