The New Yorker:

Adam Driver plays an embattled visionary in this giddily spectacular mashup of futuristic New York and ancient Rome, science fiction and political intrigue.

By Richard Brody

The good news is that the Fountain of Youth exists. The bad news is that it costs a hundred and twenty million dollars. At least, that’s what Francis Ford Coppola paid, out of his own pocket, for his own version of it—the making of his latest movie, “Megalopolis.” But he got value for his money, judging from the result, in which he seems like a younger director than he has ever been. With its intellectual earnestness, first-person grandiosity, and aesthetic extravagance, the film is more floridly and brazenly youthful than anything else Coppola has made.

Coppola, who’s eighty-five and made his first feature in 1963, is one of the most flamboyantly gifted filmmakers of his era, but, for the most part, he has subordinated his pictorial power to dramas of tight-fitting psychology and dutiful realism that have both overwhelmed and repressed it. He became a self-consciously serious director and he rarely cut loose. A great exception—the swoonily romantic 1982 musical “One from the Heart,” which had a theatrical rerelease at the start of this year—was panned (unfairly) and bankrupted him. But with “Megalopolis” he cuts looser than ever and is able to do so precisely because he’s also more serious than ever. Coppola fills the movie with fervent, rapturous rhetoric that seems to emanate, almost in his own voice, from behind the camera, and this rhetoric fuses with the visual rhetoric of what the camera does—an aesthetic flamboyance in the movie’s visual compositions, performances, design, costume, and the scale and tumult of its spectacular action. 

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