By Reviews are coming in for Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million epic “Megalopolis” and it’s proving just as divisive as expected.
After decades of gestation, the film finally had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival today where it received a hell of a reception – pulling in a ten-minute standing ovation inside the Grand Lumiere Theatre along with a few reported boos.
It arrived in the wake of a troubled production (not unusual for Coppola), reports about scepticism from buyers over commercial prospects for the movie, and a piece in The Guardian earlier this week going into inappropriate set behavior.
Now that it’s finally here, the reaction has been wild and varied depending upon the reviewer. On Rotten Tomatoes it sits at 45% (4.5/10) from 11 reviews thus far. Here’s a sampling of quotes:
“There is much to enjoy in Megalopolis, especially its castmembers, leaning into their moments with an abandon that was probably a job requirement” – Joshua Rothkopf, The LA Times
“Megalopolis might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy every single bats— second of it.” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture
“Megalopolis is anything but lazy, and while so many of the ideas don’t pan out as planned, this is the kind of late-career statement devotees wanted from the maverick, who never lost his faith in cinema.” – Peter DeBruge, Variety
“With Megalopolis, [Francis Ford Coppola] crams 85 years worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire
“It is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make — uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic, broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones.” – David Fear, Rolling Stone
“It’s windy and overstuffed, frequently baffling and way too talky, quoting Hamlet and The Tempest, Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch, ruminating on time, consciousness and power to a degree that becomes ponderous. But it’s also often amusing, playful, visually dazzling and illuminated by a touching hope for humanity.” – David Rooney, THR
“‘Megalopolis’ can feel almost as if HBO’s Rome was rewritten by a thousand monkeys, some of them even getting their spelling correct.” – Jason Gorber, The AV Club
“Megalopolis comes to us as the (perhaps final) testament of an artist now in his 80s, but sometimes it feels like the fevered thoughts of a precocious child, driven and dazzled and maybe a little lost in all the possibilities of the world before him” – Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine
“This is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“This is the junkiest of junk-drawer movies, a slapped together hash of Coppola’s many disparate inspirations. What really tanks the movie, though, is its datedness.” – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair
The film has secured several international distributors but has yet to lock in one for many key markets like the United States and Australia – even with IMAX committing to releasing the film whomever lands it. Wherever it goes, it has already generated a lot of talk and excitement.
The post The First “Megalopolis” Reviews Are In appeared first on Dark Horizons.
