Part of Essential Coppola
The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.
“Coppola has always believed in America, but his faith is eroding by the second, and MEGALOPOLIS is nothing if not the boldest and most open-hearted of his many bids to stop time before it’s too late…. He crams 85 years worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire. It doesn’t just speak to Coppola’s philosophy, it embodies it to its bones.” —David Ehrlich, IndieWire
“MEGALOPOLIS might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy every single batshit second of it.” —Bilge Ebiri, Vulture
“Say what you will about this grand gesture at filtering Edward Gibbon’s history lessons through a lens darkly, it is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make — uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic (upper-case and lower-case R), broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones.” —David Fear, Rolling Stone