If Megalopolis turns out to be the final feature film from 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola, you won’t be able to say he didn’t go out fighting. The ferociously independent auteur behind The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation parlayed his creative and economic capital (and the wealth he accumulated from his successful winery) to become the rare American filmmaker who can finance his own work.

His last studio film was 1997’s John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, and if you can name his only feature in the last fifteen years, you’re more of a hardcore Coppola fan than I am. (It was 2022’s B’Twixt Now and Sunrise, which IMDb lists as grossing a total of $1,996 worldwide.) All of which brings us to Megalopolis, the $120 million “fable” that Coppola leveraged his wine business to produce, and which stands as a monument to his artistic vision, his influence, and his ideals, as well as to his hubris, his decadence, and his dated perspective.

The setting is New Rome City, a version of mid-century New York where all the men have Ceasar cuts and the elites live in a cordoned-off pleasure dome while the hoi polloi scramble on the margins to survive. The idea of late-stage capitalist America, and the Big Apple in particular, as analogous to the final days of the Roman Empire goes back at least as far as Lou Reed’s “Romeo Had Juliette” off his 1987 album New York, but it’s not hard to understand its enduring appeal.

Coppola’s hero and, to at least some extent, stand-in, is Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), an egocentric architect who can, for unexplained reasons, stop time and who has a utopian vision for the city. From his lair in the Chrysler Building, he surveys the urban landscape and tweaks his vision for humanity. In opposition are the mayor, Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), and the financial magnate Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) goes to work for Catalina, initially as a sort of undercover agent, but ultimately as an ally. Meanwhile, Crassus’s grandson Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), plots his way to power as a Trumpian populist, and a TV reporter named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) finagles her way into the good graces of the banking tycoon. Got all that?

In fairness, the multiple narrative threads aren’t hard to follow, partially due to the expository narrative provided by Catalina’s driver Fundi (Laurence Fishburne) in voiceover. On the other hand, some plot points are bafflingly underdeveloped: there’s a defunct Soviet satellite filled with nuclear fuel that threatens to crash into New Rome, and then does, with little apparent consequence. And Catalina’s grand strategy for utilizing the miraculous liquid mineral “megalon” to craft his urban paradise is unconscionably light on details.

Some of these quirks are easy to ignore in the face of Megalopolis’s visual splendor. Though largely virtual, the sets are colossal, the costumes endearingly outré, and the cinematography (by Mihai Mălaimare Jr., who has worked on several of Coppola’s recent films) is lush and burnished. At several points, Coppola serves up delirious and transporting montage sequences, using a triptych frame and letting his psychedelic freak flag fly. These moments show a filmmaker fully committed to exploring new means of cinematic expression, freed from some Hollywood bean-counter’s complaints about hitting story beats or excessive running times. (Megalopolis runs over two hours, but one thing it never is is boring.

And yet, for a screenplay that Coppola has reportedly labored over for three decades, it often resembles a first draft hammered out by a college student on an LSD bender. The exposition is clumsy and often redundant. The endless paeans to think about the future are well-intentioned but obvious. The political allegories are ham-fisted. The characters are one-dimensional, even for a self-described fable. (Only Emmanuel’s Julia exhibits the slightest degree of internal conflict or depth, which enables her to give the movie’s best performance.)

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Moreover, for all of Coppola’s genuinely passionate concern about forging a new world for the children, one that avoids the mistakes that turned ancient Rome from a pinnacle of human achievement to an autocratic regime, his vision proves to be a retrograde one. This is an epic steeped in male, mostly white, perspectives, one in which Hamlet and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations are the lodestones of philosophy. The female characters, including Julia, are relegated to secondary “power behind the throne” positions—none are allowed to exercise any real autonomy.

Coppola seems, in other words, to have failed to consider the possibility that, if America is about to replicate the fall of Rome, there might be some commonalities between the two societies that make that inevitable. Maybe it’s time to consider incorporating non-Western, non-patriarchal, non-heteronormative structures in our conceptions of the world we want to leave behind. Maybe positing a white male savior with awkward echoes of Robert Moses’s grandiloquent omniscience is just putting a new face on old archetypes. Maybe it’s asking too much of a filmmaker who has looked forward—technologically, thematically, economically—so effectively for so long to take that extra step. But it would have been nice, and it would have made Megalopolis more than a fascinating, fatally flawed vanity project. (Opens on Friday 9/27—try to see it in IMAX!)

ALSO THIS WEEK

Lee: The veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras, a frequent collaborator of Spike Lee and Michel Gondry, makes her feature directing debut with this standard but well-crafted biopic of the American war photographer Lee Miller. Miller began her career as a fashion model for Vogue but transitioned to the other side of the camera in the 1930s, eventually becoming one of the few women chronicling action on the front lines during WWII. She was also one of the first to capture images of concentration camp carnage in the days following the war. The screenplay adopts a framing device in which Miller’s son (Josh O’Connor) interviews her thirty years later, and flashes back to her European experiences with lover (and later husband) Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), Life magazine photographer David Scherman (Andy Samberg), and British Vogue editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough). Samberg, if you’re wondering, manages to rein in his Jake Peralta smarm and does decent dramatic work. A more thorough take on Miller’s eventful life would have included more on her association with French surrealists and their milieu, including Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso, but it’s understandable that Kuras would focus (pun intended) on the passion that drove Miller to shatter gendered boundaries in order to capture reality in all its beauty and horror. (Opens Friday 9/27)

Portland Latin American Film Festival: This event always does a stellar job of bringing otherwise unseen films to the big screen. This year’s lineup kicks off tonight (9/25) with Los Frikis, an alternately raucous and poignant drama inspired by the true story of dozens of Cubans, frequently punk rockers or other outsides, who in the early 1990s intentionally infected themselves with HIV so they could escape their poverty-ridden lives and live in a government-funded sanitorium. After his older brother Paco (Héctor Medina) takes this desperate step, teenaged Gustavo (Eros de la Puente) convinces a doctor to forge his papers so that he can tag along. Once there, they and their fellow patients experience a freedom they had been denied thanks to Castro’s ban on rock music. Gustavo also falls for the beautiful nurse (Adria Arjona of Hit Man) who supervises their care. For Paco, however, the cure he assumed would be quickly forthcoming doesn’t arrive, and Paco wrestles with his guilt over faking his eligibility. From Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz, the directors of the instant cult classic The Peanut Butter Falcon, it’s a film that walks a tightrope between maudlin and nihilistic. The festival continues next Wednesday 10/2 with Boca Chica, a coming-of-age tale about an aspiring adolescent rapper in the Dominican Republic. Additional screenings continue through October and November at the Hollywood Theatre.

Notice to Quit: Michael Zeger, best known as the husband of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, stars in this amiable, shaggy New York-set indie as a struggling, somewhat unethical realtor who’s about to get evicted from his apartment when his estranged 10-year-old daughter (Kasey Bella Suarez) shows up out of the blue. She’s run off the day before she and her mother are to move to Florida, and she insists on accompanying him as he pursues one cockamamie scheme after another to make rent. Robert Klein pops in as Zeger’s father, and the urban visuals match the 1970s, lovable-loser vibe thanks to sharp 35mm cinematography. Writer-director Simon Hacker’s first feature doesn’t necessarily reinvent the wise kid/foolish parent trope, but it’s a decent enough iteration. (Opens Friday 9/27 at Regal Fox Tower and other locations)

Sleep: It is a truth universally acknowledged that sleepwalking is creepy. Being in the presence of a somnambulant loved one who’s caught in a twilight zone of consciousness is a distinctly unnerving experience. This effective Korean thriller from director Jason Yu takes that fact and runs with it. Up-and-coming actor Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) and his very pregnant wife Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) are happily preparing for the next stage in their lives when Hyun-Su starts to experience odd episodes of sitting up and talking in his sleep. These become more intense after the baby is born, to the point that Soo-jin feels obliged to remain awake whenever he’s asleep to make sure he doesn’t do anything drastic to the child. (Tragically, Lee, who also appeared in the Oscar-winning Parasite, commited suicide last December following a tabloid scandal related to allegations of drug use.) While Sleep doesn’t quite hit its landing, it’s a promsing, sleek debut for director Yu. (Opens Friday 9/27 at Salem Cinema)

Azrael: In a world…where speech is forbidden and society is shattered, a young woman (Samara Weaving) fights for her life against a group of post-apocalyptic demon worshippers. Or something like that. It turns out that when you make a movie where none of the characters are allowed to utter comprehensible dialogue, it can be difficult to nail down the specifics of what’s actually going on. Despite Gloria Swanson’s boast that in the silent movie era, they “didn’t need words” because “they had faces then,” they also had intertitles.  The promising premise of a silent horror film, ably executed in the A Quiet Place movies, is underexplored by writer Simon Barrett and director E.L. Katz, and a tense first half degenerates into a ludicrous gorefest. Weaving demonstrated her ability to take on-screen punishment in 2019’s Ready or Not, and she summons similar Final Girl energy here, but without much support. (Opens Friday 9/27 at Regal Fox Tower, the Kiggins Theater, and other locations)

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STREAMING DEBUTS

Wolfs: Ordinarily, this pairing of George Clooney and Brad Pitt would be another opportunity to bemoan the fact that even flicks with big stars and audience-friendly concepts are increasingly bypassing theaters to debut on streaming services. I mean, two of the highest Q Score personalities in the Western world team up in a comic thriller from the director of Spider-Man: Homecoming to play rival “cleaners” forced to team up and tidy a crime scene—what’s not to like, America? And yet, in this instance, Wolfs feels almost more suited to the at-home viewing experience. Clooney and Pitt, both adept and mining humor from being taken down a size, feel like they’re playing avatars of their images. When a young, briefs-clad man (Austin Abrams) is seemingly killed in a drug-fueled accident in the hotel room of a high-ranking New York District Attorney (Amy Ryan), she calls in a favor and Pitt shows up, closely followed by Clooney, who’s been similarly tasked by the hotel’s owners to dispose of the body. Well, the kid’s not dead, and the pair engage in a Reluctant Team-Up over the course of one very long night. Jon Watts’s direction is slick and effective, the stars can do this stuff in their sleep, and the only jolt of originality comes from Abrams, whose character is initially terrified but comes to geekily idolize his black-clad companions. It’s the perfect blockbuster to fold laundry to. (Streaming on AppleTV+ as of Friday 9/27)

I’ll Be Right There: I only recently learned that Jeannie Berlin, who plays Edie Falco’s mother here and had a series-long supporting role on Succession, is Elaine May’s daughter and memorably starred in 1971’s The Heartbreak Kid. So I feel the need to mention it at every possible opportunity. Falco, who previously worked with director Brendan Walsh on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, plays Wanda (perhaps a Barbara Loden shout-out?), your typical overworked, underappreciated mother, here saddled with two needy grown children, a dyspeptic mother, a sad-sack boyfriend (Michael Rapaport), and a sex-crazed girlfriend (Sepideh Moafi). She feels pulled in every direction, but, as writer Jim Beggarly is at pains to remind us, the fault may lie in Wanda’s inability to let others solve their own problems as much as in everyone else’s willingness to let her be there for them. The cast is top-notch, Wanda’s bisexuality is refreshingly treated as NBD, and the situation is certain to be relatable to more than a few audience members. Easy to swallow indie-film comfort food. (Available On Demand for rental or purchase starting on Friday 9/27)