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, 2024Now 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