There are passion projects, and then there are movies like the great Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a decades-in-the-making epic as much notable for being the filmmaker’s return to directing after a nearly 15-year absence as shaking up notions of what might come to mind when we hear that a movie is “self-financed.” Usually films belonging to that category are small in scope, made on a wing and a prayer with the backing of, say, a Kickstarter campaign fortunate enough to have met its humble financial goals. Megalopolis, though, is a $120 million project, a budget made possible by Coppola selling a chunk of his successful winery.

The movie is not, unfortunately, a triumphant return for a mercurial filmmaker whose brilliance and caprices have intermittently melded into movies the public can almost universally agree are masterpieces: the Godfather trilogy, The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979) among them. Even among its champions, the word I’ve seen most frequently invoked to describe Megalopolis is “mess.” But it’s a fascinating kind of disaster, as admirably ambitious and endearingly idiosyncratic as it is regularly confounding. 

Read the full review at South Sound.