Megalopolis
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Careless People: Mark Asch on Gamification, Impunity and 2024 in Film
Juror #2, which I saw the night before the presidential election, concerns a man who looks at his phone while driving, hits and kills a fellow citizen, and keeps going. A year later, summoned to serve on a jury at the trial of the man wrongly accused of the crime, the driver scrambles to escape responsibility for his actions while still telling himself that he’s a good person. Clint Eastwood’s film, a Southern courtroom thriller in the John Grisham mode, has been called a throwback. For one thing, the juror’s car is a midsize SUV from Grisham’s mid-1990s heyday, not […]
by Mark Asch on Dec 16, 2024 -
“We Needed Crazier Ideas”: DP Mihai Malaimare Jr. on Megalopolis
During his storied career, Francis Ford Coppola forged relationships with some of film’s most renowned cinematographers: Gordon Willis, Vittorio Storaro, Bill Butler, John Toll and Jordan Cronenweth all shot multiple projects for him. But with Megalopolis, Mihai Malaimare Jr. becomes Coppola’s most frequent collaborator behind the camera. They first met when Coppola came to Malaimare’s native Romania to shoot 2007’s Youth Without Youth, the beginning of a low-budget experimental phase for Coppola that included the Malaimare-shot Tetro and Twixt. Even then, Coppola was already dreaming of his quixotic passion project Megalopolis, showing Malaimare concept art and B-roll of New York […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 11, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: Megalopolis
Taking a page from Lost Highway‘s long-ago trick of using “Two Thumbs Down” as a blurb for the poster, the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis pullquotes many of the negative responses to his work over the years, some from long-dead critics like Andrew Sarris and John Simon. (Here’s Vadim Rizov’s review from Cannes.) The film opens September 27 from Lionsgate. UPDATE: Lionsgate has pulled the Megalopolis trailer originally included in this post after critics and outlets pointed out that the negative blurbs contained in the trailer could not be sourced from the original reviews and may be fabricated. In a […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Aug 21, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: Megalopolis
Now that Megalopolis has premiered, nothing has actually changed. The film is a self-consciously impractical act that few would care nearly as much about if it weren’t very publicly known to have cost $120 million of Francis Ford Coppola’s personal money. That’s the kind of extravagant gesture you don’t get to ever see on this scale, and hence destined to be praised for being willed into existence amidst a sea of algorithimically conceived risk-aversion—or, alternately, decried as a hubristic folly in the trades with a palpable subtext of “how dare he?” Megalopolis is praiseworthy for mostly predictable reasons: lavish eccentricity, […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 17, 2024
