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MEGALOPOLIS
At his best, Francis Ford Coppola is able to tie personal, human stories with grandiose themes and sweeping statements—a crime family’s struggles become a metaphor for the American Dream, or a secret mission in Vietnam lays bare the history of Western imperialism. Megalopolis, Coppola’s long-gestating treatise on the fall of the Roman Empire, attempts to follow in the footsteps of his other masterpieces, but four decades of development and a creator with too much to say and too many ways to say it leaves the project a jabbering mess, landing somewhere between The Fountainhead and Southland Tales. Set in the modern metropolis of New Rome, the story centers on the rivalry between two visionaries: Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), an ambitious architect hoping to build the city of the future, and Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a conservative figurehead dedicated to maintaining the status quo. Our window into this conflict is Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), Cicero’s daughter who becomes Cesar’s assistant, muse, and lover. This plot is the film’s strongest, owing largely to the talents of Esposito and Emmanuel. However, too often Coppola treats Megalopolis less as a coherent story and more as a playground for experimentation. Subplots commenting on the political movements and celebrity culture of New Rome don’t connect to anything beyond vague ideas about populism and the abuse of power, not helped by dialogue that’s either repeated exposition or cringeworthy entendres. The film hops in and out of heavy-handed visual metaphor with little rhyme or reason, further hindered by weak visual effects and a slapdash approach to editing. Worst of all, Coppola doesn’t feel the need to dig into the ideas he presents—neither Cesar’s utopian society nor the fantastical elements (his miracle alloy invention and time-manipulation powers) that make it possible. Megalopolis is the kind of bad movie we don’t see often these days: a filmmaker’s idiosyncrasies writ large on a $125 million canvas. It’s a project that ought to be dissected and analyzed for generations to come, though I can’t promise it’ll be enjoyed by anyone. R. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Living Room Theaters, Studio One Theaters, AMC, Cinemark and Regal locations.
THE SUBSTANCE
Demi Moore delivers a career-defining performance in The Substance, writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s new body horror film that would be an Oscar contender if the Academy gave horror the respect it deserves. Elisabeth (Moore) is a TV aerobics star who loses her job and gets into a car accident on her 50th birthday. Subsequently, she’s offered the chance to test out a serum that will create a younger, more socially perfect version of herself named Sue (Margaret Qualley). This experiment comes with several rules, including one that requires Elisabeth and Sue to switch back every seven days in a week-on, week-off body timeshare agreement, or face mysterious, irreversible consequences. After being born graphically from Elisabeth’s back, Sue meets TV producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid), who offers Elisabeth’s old job in their first meeting, launching her quest for fame of her own. Soon, both women begin to abuse the serum, which unleashes a power struggle harboring monstrous side effects. Seasoned horror fans will appreciate The Substance’s dark humor, bloody practical effects, and tasteful hints of inspiration from director David Cronenberg and classics like Society, Carrie and Alien. The Substance offers a smart depiction of the dark side of meeting the beauty standards created by the same industry producing the film. R. RUDY VALDEZ. Regal Fox Tower, Cinema 21, Cinemagic, Laurelhurst Theater, Hollywood Theatre.
MY FIRST FILM
From Fellini’s 8½ onward, movies about directors making semi-autobiographical movies have long explored the power of dreams and egos. My First Film, Zia Anger’s debut feature (well, debut *released* feature, it’s crucial to note), isn’t so much a corrective to those typically masculine meta smorgasbords, but hers is certainly a more universal approach to anyone who’s tried to make high-art but didn’t yet know what they didn’t know.
Here, Anger (best known for directing Mitski and Maggie Rogers music videos) chronicles not the making of a fake masterpiece but her would-be first feature, which never saw the light of the day.
Set in Anger’s laptop editing suite, My First Film whisks the viewer 15 years earlier. Odessa Young (Mothering Sunday, Shirley) stars as Anger’s stand-in: a young director wrangling friends into shooting a densely symbolic DIY film in her Upstate New York hometown. Is this a good film? Quite possibly not, but My First Film is all about the achingly personal yet hilariously slapdash nature of someone’s artistic adolescence. In one of the film’s best contradictions, Vita (Young) taps her friend Dina (Devon Ross) as her muse, but what if your muse can’t muster a credible on-camera scream?
As the walls of autobiography and the production itself begin to collapse in My First Film, Anger compares filmmaking to a reproductive cycle, specifically the pain and the freedom of aborting a project that was supposed to be the grandest birth. But if you make a good movie about making a movie that never came out, does it not live? R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Amazon Prime, Apple TV.
NEVER LET GO
There are so many types of horror Never Let Go wants to be, a desperation that only grows more frantic as the film progresses. Sometimes it wishes it were a psyche thriller, using parental overprotection as a springboard for (badly) discussing familial trauma, and the classic spooky question of, “What if Momma’s been wrong?” Other times, it focuses heavily on jumpscares, relying on peoples’ uncharacteristically stupid decisions in convenience of a script that you can only find at the bottom of the Blumhouse barrel. Then sometimes, it just wants to go full-on supernatural. While it tries to do it all, Never Let Go is never particularly frightening or thematically engaging.
A mother (Halle Berry) protects her two sons from a presence only she can see in a nondescript, post-apocalyptic environment. Never Let Go has potential to realize true psychological, familial and paranormal terror. Unfortunately, writers KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby opt for fake-out tension, terrible dialogue and a third act that resolves the mystery in what feels like an attempt to satisfy the whole test audience, leaving nothing open to interpretation. Berry’s one-note act of maternal fear does not help, and while Anthony B. Jenkins and Percy Draggs lV fare better as her sons, they don’t really have the stomach to follow through with the emotional sparring and escalating confrontations they build up the entire movie. The most gifted actors would struggle portraying this level of resentment and sibling violence, but it’s clear the boys’ range is simply not there yet, which only further highlights the script’s ridiculous attempts to imagine three-dimensional people. Alexandre Aja has proven to be a rather visceral director of horror in the past, but even so, we all have our days at work where everything is against us. R. MAX FAINARU-WADA. Cinemark Century Eastport Plaza, Cinemark Clackamas Town Center, Regal Lloyd Center, Regal Pioneer Place.