Film review: Megalopolis' sprawling story lacks cohesion and clarity

Francis Ford Coppola compares a futuristic America and ‘Old Rome’ in Megalopolis (15A), which stars Adam Driver as Caesar Catilina, an architectural genius whose vision for his city brings him into conflict with Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), whose daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) finds herself intrigued by her father’s nemesis.

A passion project for Coppola that has been decades in the making, Megalopolis is very much a film of ideas, to the extent that the characters are more frequently found to be espousing philosophy as advancing the plot.

Adam Driver gives the ‘obsessive-compulsive’ Caesar a formidable dignity throughout, but the sprawling story lacks cohesion and clarity.