The lights dimmed in a movie theater Thursday night for maybe the most prime example of an arthouse film to come along this year, and together the audience watched as Cesar Catilina, played by Adam Driver, edged out of his office window to stand on a metal ledge at the edge of a skyscraper, balancing vertiginously over traffic. He wobbled, and almost began to fall.
It was the opening scene on opening night for legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie, Megalopolis: A Fable, but we weren’t in an arthouse theater. We were in Cinemark, in North Haven, the closest place screening the limited-release film. With the Criterion closed and New Haven without a first-run theater of any kind, would it be the same?
In The Mix
Megalopolis has been very polarizing since it screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It received a seven-minute standing ovation from the crowd there, but this Vulture review aptly sums up the mixture of admiration, bewilderment, and rejection that followed.
For U.S. film fans, the time between the screening at Cannes and the movie’s U.S. theatrical release has been, well, something. There was the news that Coppola had financed the film himself — all $120 million of its budget — by selling off a vineyard. There were also the allegations, published in the Guardian and in Variety, of Coppola “acting with impunity” on set and trying “to kiss some of the topless and scantily clad female extras.” The actors are suing Coppola; Coppola, in turn, is suing Variety. And the polarizing reviews just keep coming. Just this week, the film was screened for U.S. critics and the pattern continues, with a positive review from Manohla Dargis at the New York Times, an entertainingly mixed review from Moira Macdonald at the Seattle Times, and a gleefully negative take from Drew Magary at SF Gate.
