Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola spent decades chasing Megalopolis, and the 2024 result is less a conventional drama than a sprawling, self-funded fable about what a city could become after catastrophe.
What is Megalopolis about?
Adam Driver plays an idealistic architect with the power to reshape matter itself, determined to rebuild a fictionalized New York, reimagined as the fallen empire of New Rome, as a utopian metropolis in the wake of a devastating collapse. His vision puts him at odds with a pragmatic mayor and a web of powerful families more interested in preserving their own influence than in his radical blueprint. Giancarlo Esposito plays that mayor, while Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, and Shia LaBeouf circle the architect as allies, rivals, and outright saboteurs with their own designs on the city's future. The film moves in grand, theatrical gestures rather than a tight plot, staging its ideas about ambition, decay, and reinvention as spectacle: opulent parties, public trials, and speeches about civilization's fate, all filtered through Coppola's decades-old fascination with Roman history repeating itself in American form.
Cast & crew
Driver plays the architect as part visionary, part martyr, carrying long monologues about time and creation with total conviction. Esposito brings a grounded, weary realism to the mayor that keeps the film's more operatic scenes tethered to something recognizable. Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, and Talia Shire round out a cast stacked with veteran presence, each given at least one showcase scene.
Context & significance
Coppola first began developing Megalopolis in the 1980s and financed the eventual production largely himself, decades after Apocalypse Now and The Godfather made his name. Its blend of ancient Roman allegory and modern American urban anxiety has made it one of the more divisive studio-scale releases in recent memory, praised by some for its sheer ambition and criticized by others for its unruly structure.
Where & how to watch
Megalopolis is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and subtitles, part of a library built for Farsi-speaking viewers in the diaspora. Streaming requires a free K-Time account and login, though the film's page is open to browse without one.