"What good do we have of idealism? Of sweeping visions, cure-all fixes, or radical upheavals promised by individuals? The last thing the world needs is to be overseen by a liberal Ayn Rand protagonist who thinks themselves a “dreamer”. But what if artists were forced to only dream as big as Megalopolis?

Megalopolis, the long-gestating ion project of a world-famous canonised director, asks us what good a genius can bring to our civilisation. It finally arrived, bumped, bruised, and burdened with a fair share of controversy, and stands a lonely, janky dream from a director who didn’t have to make this film, but did have to pay for it himself—all $120 million of it.

It looks like no other film that costs the same amount, it elicits bafflement in nearly every scene, and great streaks of it feel unrealised and cluttered. But the sincerity with which Francis Ford Coppola deploys idealism, complicated by the blatant theatricality of its messaging, results in a film of fierce, confused hope, sustaining madness and frustration for the 2-hour-plus runtime."

Full thoughts on the imperfections, and their confused beauty, of Megalopolis, which has well and truly arrived. For Flicks UK