movies

Francis Ford Coppola’s 140-minute, self-financed magnum opus received a mixed reaction at its Cannes Film Festival premiere on Thursday (16 May).

The Godfather director’s new dystopian drama, Megalopolis, stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, an architect-scientist who wants to better a fictional version of New York City called New Rome.

Journalists present at the screening reported booing from the audience after the film ended. However, the boos quickly turned to cheers when an “In Memoriam” segment proceeded to play for Coppola’s late wife Eleanor, World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy reported.

The director and cast then received a seven-minute standing ovation.

“Thank you all so much. It is so impossible to find words to tell you how I feel,” Coppola said after the credits rolled, introducing his family members to the audience.

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Megalopolis has divided critics, debuting on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 53 per cent at the time of writing.

New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri wrote that, at times, the film “feels like the fevered thoughts of a precocious child, driven and dazzled and maybe a little lost in all the possibilities of the world before him”.

At one moment during the film, an actor reportedly appeared on the Cannes stage, playing a journalist, speaking to Cesar on the screen as if he were at a press conference.