Decline and Folly

In an otherwise rather monotonous year for cinema, the hype surrounding Francis Ford Coppola’s labour-of-love Megalopolis made the film something of a cultural event. Eight of the ten highest grossing films of 2024 have been franchise sequels, and gloomy articles about declining attendance have continued to appear in the press. So, would an eagerly awaited passion project from one of America’s great artists revive auteur cinema? It would not. Megalopolis is a mortifying disaster.

A sober review of Coppola’s career suggests that the expectations his new film was asked to support were overwrought. His career crested early, after all, with a remarkable run of four consecutive classics in just seven years—The Godfather (1972), The Conversation and The Godfather Part II (both 1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). That was always going to be a hard act to follow, but nothing Coppola has made since has even approached the brilliance of his work during that short period. During the 1980s and ’90s, he lurched uncertainly between genres without ever finding suitable material or producing a really memorable or satisfying film.

After he directed the moderately successful John Grisham potboiler The Rainmaker in 1997, Coppola retreated from studio work to concentrate on more personal filmmaking again. The three films he directed before Megalopolis—Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009), and Twixt (2011)—drew respectable reviews and small cult followings, but they passed most audiences by unnoticed. And as Coppola has since acknowledged, these minor works were really just practice runs for Megalopolis, the picture he had wanted to make since the end of the 1970s.