Megalopolis (2024)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
In a futuristic New York known as New Rome, visionary architect Cesar Catilina dreams of building "Megalopolis," a utopian city that redefines society’s limits. Opposing him is the corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero, who clings to power and profit. Between them stands Julia, the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar forces her to choose between loyalty, ambition, and the fate of humanity.
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4 films that influenced Megalopolis
What critics say influenced Megalopolis
The other, more intentional cinematic touchstones are common and occasionally evocative: a submerged woman's hair floats like poor Shelley Winters in The Night of the Hunter; the RKO Pictures logo is recreated in second-unit photography; and Plaza's fantastic performance as Wow takes on a German Expressionist twist as the silhouettes of her fingers literally push the men in her life in the directions she wants, reminiscent of a femme fatale Max Schreck.
Orgiastic early nightclub scenes rekindle memories of Tinto Brass’s Caligula.
Given the director's frequent pronouncements of disdain for superhero movies, it's striking how many scenes of Megalopolis visually echo the flatness of a Marvel movie, or for that matter how the director lets LaBeouf mug so much as the villainous Claudio that he inadvertently resembles all those ‘90s actors trying to imitate Jack Nicholson's Batman performance, complete with a sequence of LaBeouf scheming before a skyline about “wait until this city get a load of me.”
In this alternative timeline, Alejandro Jodorowsky actually got to make his version of Dune. As such, director / producer Frank Pavich never made a documentary called Jodorowsky’s Dune about an aborted ambitious, audacious film by a visionary director. Instead, Pavich made Coppola’s Megalopolis.