Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million personal passion project epic Megalopolis had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday and the reviews are split. The screening received the now customary standing ovation from Cannes, along with some boos.
Rotten Tomatoes has Megalopolis at 45%, reflecting this split.
In the positive column, here are some review 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 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
Now for the negative reviews:
“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, Vulture
“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
This feels like one of those movies where some will nod like sages, stroking their chins thoughtfully, and think that you didn’t like it because you didn’t “get it”, while others just wonder what the hell they just sat through.
Distributor deals are still not locked for several key markets.
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