Megalopolis
Lionsgate | Release Date: September 27, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
55
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 60 Critic Reviews
Positive:
26
Mixed:
24
Negative:
10
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
iChristina NewlandSep 27, 2024
There’s a sense of tinkering originality to the film that feels unlike anything else being made at the moment. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzSep 25, 2024
This is grasping at something, or really at everything, everywhere, all the time. It feels like a bunch of unfinished ideas, despite the lengthy gestation period. Read full review
60
EmpireJohn NugentSep 24, 2024
This is a film about nothing less than the future of America and the history of mankind. It is brash and bonkers and doesn’t always hang together, but 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola has rarely been as audacious. Read full review
60
The IndependentGeoffrey MacnabMay 17, 2024
Ultimately, this isn’t the car crash it could have been. It is, though, deeply flawed and very eccentric. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMay 16, 2024
It’s windy and overstuffed, frequently baffling and way too talky, quoting Hamlet and The Tempest, Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch, ruminating on time, consciousness and power to a degree that becomes ponderous. But it’s also often amusing, playful, visually dazzling and illuminated by a touching hope for humanity. Read full review
55
The Daily BeastNick SchagerSep 27, 2024
A daring saga that boasts far more moments that stumble than soar. It’s a mess that can be admired—but a mess, nonetheless. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerSep 27, 2024
Ostensibly it’s a tradition versus progress fable. In actuality, it’s a movie furiously, perhaps intentionally, at odds with itself. Read full review
50
ABC NewsPeter TraversSep 27, 2024
With so little to show for its staggering ambition to synthesize modern New York with the fall of the Roman Empire, Francis Ford Coppola's all-star, self-financed passion project is a mess, but the lion who made it is still roaring, even in winter. Read full review
50
Original-CinChris KnightSep 26, 2024
New Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we don’t always get the film we want. I doubt even Coppola did with this one. Megalopolis is what it is. You probably wouldn’t want to move there. But it’s worth visiting as a tourist, if only to gape at the locals. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenSep 26, 2024
Even though the film is a jumble that oftentimes leaves its top-notch cast unmoored and renders its science-fiction elements somewhat anemic in light of our current expectations from special effects, Megalopolis is truly one from the heart, an outpouring from one cinephile to his tribe. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliSep 25, 2024
Even those approaching Megalopolis with an open mind and fully expecting to see an expensive and expansive art film may be disappointed by the result. The more I reflect on the movie, the more convinced I become that the things Coppola does well are dwarfed by missed opportunities and outright missteps. Read full review
50
The Associated PressLindsey BahrSep 25, 2024
Megalopolis is not a disaster, but it’s far from a success. It’s a bacchanalia that’s bursting with so many ideas, so many characters, so many great lines and truly terrible ones as well that it’s nearly impossible to digest in a single, baffling viewing. Read full review
50
Washington PostTy BurrSep 25, 2024
Is “Megalopolis” the movie that Coppola has wanted to make for more than 40 years? Absolutely. Is it an unfashionable ode to optimism and the freedom to create, a vision as generous as it is crazy as it is overflowing with delirious invention? That, too. Read full review
50
LooperAudrey FoxMay 19, 2024
It's muddled in the extreme and few of its cast members make it out of the debacle unscathed, but its willful rejection of what audiences might want to see in favor of what Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make is so bold you almost have to admire it. Read full review
50
VarietyPeter DebrugeMay 16, 2024
To call this garish, idea-bloated monstrosity a mere “fable” is to grossly undersell the project’s expansive insights into art, life and legacy. Read full review
42
ConsequenceLiz Shannon MillerSep 26, 2024
Really, the madness of Megalopolis is the kind of thing where you actually do kind of have to see it for yourself. Especially because there are moments that feel audacious in the way that Coppola’s The Godfather shocked audiences back in the day, choices that confirm this is not a filmmaker playing it safe. That’s an instinct to be admired. Even if it results in this. Read full review
40
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeSep 29, 2024
For all its big-hitting visual ambition, philosophical window dressing and pick-and-mix literary references, this is a work of screaming emptiness. Read full review
40
The Irish TimesTara BradySep 26, 2024
It remains something to see, interestingly atrocious, misfiring on the grandest scale, and often best watched through the fingers. Megaflopolis might be a better name for it. Read full review
40
NMELou ThomasMay 23, 2024
Whether Megalopolis is a critical or commercial success remains to be seen but it’s strange enough to surely have a long life as a cult film. Read full review
40
Total FilmAnna SmithMay 20, 2024
From overblown sci-fi concepts to incest and erections, Megalopolis is a comedy of errors in a more literal sense than may have been intended, despite its many Shakespeare references. Read full review
40
The Daily BeastEsther ZuckermanMay 17, 2024
Megalopolis is the kind of thing that has to be seen to be believed. Many will find it uproarious, others may locate some profundity, most will have to shake their heads. Whatever it is, it’s a lot. Read full review
40
Screen DailyTim GriersonMay 16, 2024
Adam Driver brings a brooding energy to the role of a tortured genius architect seeking to craft a modern utopia in a city threatened by mindless spectacle and rampant greed, but Megalopolis is stymied by arbitrary plotting and numbing excess. One can feel Coppola’s anger and sorrow over the decline of his beloved America, but narrative coherence is far less apparent. Read full review
40
ColliderChase HutchinsonMay 16, 2024
Much like the city being built in the film, it’s all more interesting in theory than it ever is in actuality. Now that we will all have the chance to take it in for ourselves, the greatest revelation is that there just isn’t that much there to see. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 16, 2024
For me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence. Read full review
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