Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis, which feels at times like an object lesson in what happens when no one is able to tell a filmmaker when his ideas are bad. The lights dimmed in a movie theater Thursday night for maybe the most prime example of an arthouse film to come along this year, and together the audience watched as Cesar Catilina, played by Adam Driver, edged out of his office window to stand on a metal ledge at the edge of a skyscraper, balancing vertiginously over traffic. He wobbled, and almost began to fall. It was the opening scene on opening night for legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie, Megalopolis: A Fable, but we weren’t in an arthouse theater. We were in Cinemark, in North Haven, the closest place screening the limited-release film. With the Criterion closed and New Haven without a first-run theater of any kind, would it be the same?In The MixMegalopolis has been very polarizing since it screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It received a seven-minute standing ovation from the crowd there, but this Vulture review aptly sums up the mixture of admiration, bewilderment, and rejection that followed. For U.S. film fans, the time between the screening at Cannes and the movie’s U.S. theatrical release has been, well, something. There was the news that Coppola had financed the film himself — all $120 million of its budget — by selling off a vineyard. There were also the allegations, published in the Guardian and in Variety, of Coppola ​“acting with impunity” on set and trying ​“to kiss some of the topless and scantily clad female extras.” The actors are suing Coppola; Coppola, in turn, is suing Variety. And the polarizing reviews just keep coming. Just this week, the film was screened for U.S. critics and the pattern continues, with a positive review from Manohla Dargis at the New York Times, an entertainingly mixed review from Moira Macdonald at the Seattle Times, and a gleefully negative take from Drew Magary at SF Gate.Coppola’s on-set behavior appears to have been atrocious, but I am, in short, one of those people who believe bad people can make great art, and we should acknowledge both things fully. I’m prone to balancing what I know about the artist with my appreciation of their art. To pick just two examples, I never really enjoyed R. Kelly’s music enough to feel any remorse about dropping him when his horrendous treatment of women came to light, but I haven’t stopped and will likely never stop listening to James Brown, even though he was by many accounts a terrible person, who among other things, physically assaulted his wives. Horrible human; revolutionary musician. Both should be known, and grappled with. Returning to Coppola, his imperious and allegedly inappropriate on-set actions are matched by what he has done since then. A defensive trailer trying to point out that his well-regarded movies of the past were disliked by critics at the time turned out to be full of fabricated quotes. He appears to have joined Letterboxd for the explicit purpose of giving his own movie a high rating.The mixture of reviews, however, was thoroughly intriguing to me. Some of my favorite movies — films that changed me, that I think about all the time — got decidedly mixed reviews upon release, like Alex Cox’s Repo Man and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. In 1999, I saw David Fincher’s Fight Club in the theater because of an especially negative review of it that, in its disgust, really convinced me that it was my kind of movie (correctly so; an experience amplified by the fact that the theater itself, a small place on 42nd St. in Manhattan, had quite evidently, in a previous iteration, been a pornhouse). I will also maintain that David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are essentially the same movie, which makes it hilarious to me that the first one got terrible reviews on its release and the second one got raves. Sometimes reviews don’t get it ​“right.” Even more specifically, my own feelings about Coppola’s movies are mixed. Like everyone ever, I think of The Godfather and The Godfather Part IIas stone-cold masterpieces. I think of Apocalypse Now as a highly flawed movie, but the highs more than balance out the lows. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep during Dracula. So I came to Megalopolis with an open mind.I also went to Megalopolis with a keen appreciation that it was exactly the sort of movie that, in the past, would have screened at the Criterion on Temple Street, and farther back than that, at York Square Cinema. With New Haven bereft of any first-run movie theater — let alone a smaller indie theater — I bought tickets to see it at Cinemark in North Haven, the closest movie theater screening it. I thought of the memorable experiences I’d had watching movies in New Haven since moving here in 2002. Y Tu Mamá También (maybe my favorite movie, if I had to choose) at York Square; Snowpiercer and Hobo with a Shotgun, which both got screened in Criterion’s smallest theater. Would people drive from New Haven to North Haven to see Megalopolis? Odds were good: before my hometown of Ithaca, N.Y. got an independent movie theater (which, astonishingly, it still has, now run as a nonprofit) and before I had a driver’s license, I convinced a couple friends and a friend’s mom to drive two hours to Rochester, N.Y. to see the anime Akira for its U.S. theatrical release in 1988. Some people will go a long way to see a movie."Going In With High Hopes"The online seat diagram revealed that Cinemark had, like the Criterion before it, chosen its smaller theater to screen Megalopolis (Coppola struggled to find a U.S. distributor for the film until Lionsgate took it on). In the lobby, there was no poster for it; the only indication that the movie was there was on its LED board listing movie times. I settled in, and sure enough, about 20 other people joined me.Among them were Hamden resident Mike Rubino, who came to see Megalopolis because of its ​“star-studded cast” and because ​“I like the premise of it.” Asked about switching up from seeing movies at Cinemark to seeing them at the Criterion, he said ​“we have to change with the times.… The Criterion was okay. It was good for the people who lived downtown,” he said, but pointed out that the parking situation made it harder for people outside of downtown to go there easily. ​“I think it was doomed from the start, honestly,” he added.He remembered as a kid working security at the building where the Criterion was, when it was a United Illuminating office. A lifelong area resident, he recalled also that ​“the last movie theater that probably did any business was the Roger Sherman Theater,” which opened in the 1920s as a vaudeville theater, became a movie theater, then was renovated in 1984 to become the Palace Theater, before closing for 12 years to be reborn as College Street Music Hall in 2015. He also recalled the Strand Theater in Hamden and the Forest Theater in West Haven, ​“one of the last little theaters to close” that ​“is now a parking lot. I went there as a kid and it was $2. A drink was 50 cents. Candies were a dollar.” He recalled going to the Bowl Drive-In in West Haven, which closed in 1979, as a kid.He watches plenty of movies at home, ​“but there’s times when there’s something I really want to see” on a big screen, like the most recent Deadpool movie. ​“Even though I’ll probably watch it five more times” at home, ​“seeing it for the first time with the sound and the screen — it’s definitely an effect that, I don’t care how big your TV is, you don’t get that at home.”Luke Pennacchini was also in the audience. The 18-year-old works as a projectionist at Madison Cinemas. ​“I’m a huge fan of film,” and with Megalopolis, he was hopeful that he was about to see ​“the next step in film.”Pennacchini goes to Gateway and ​“closing the Criterion was a huge blow to me because I was looking forward to seeing movies there.” When he saw Cinemark was screening Megalopolis, ​“I bought tickets immediately because I was so stoked to see this movie on the big screen. I think it’s going to be this monumental moment in my life,” he said with a laugh, ​“to see a Francis Ford Coppola movie” during its first theatrical run.He (like me) was well aware of the movie’s fractious reception. ​“I’m hoping it’s great,” he said, ​“but either way, it’s going to be a huge step for cinema. I’m going in with high hopes.” He added that ​“I wouldn’t want to watch it on my 55-inch or whatever TV. I’d much rather see it on the biggest screen possible. I urge everybody to see movies on the biggest screen possible. No more streaming!”So How Was The Movie?Before getting to the movie itself, it seems important to take issue with one of Magary’s points, that ​“the only reason this film was released was because Coppola made it, and the only reason that Coppola made it was because he’s a centimillionaire,” referring to the fact that Coppola financed it himself rather than finding money from a production company, as almost all films do. To Magary, this makes it a vanity project by a well-regarded and thoroughly established filmmaker, and thus worthy of all the ridicule he can muster. I’d like to split a hair about this that ends up with larger ramifications: that movies that take any risks at all and get noticed for it are fewer and farther between than they used to be — especially compared to Coppola’s heyday in the 1970s, but perhaps even compared to the 1990s. And, more insidiously, we, the moviegoing public, have been told a few times that a movie is risky as part of its marketing scheme, when the movie itself is backed by entities that have no real interest in taking any risks. I’d argue this is the case for 2018’s Black Panther; it was very entertaining, often beautiful, full of sharp, committed performances, and quite justifiably gave a huge boost to the careers of a lot of Black artists, and that’s fantastic. But it was a movie that was thoroughly safe for White people to see. Sorry to Bother You, which came out in the same year (and is one of my favorite movies of the past decade), and which cobbled together its financing from several smaller production companies, actually did what Marvel — a subsidiary of Disney — wanted us to believe Black Panther was doing, in asking some very uncomfortable questions about race relations in the U.S. Making a riskier movie these days, especially on a bigger budget, is maybe as difficult as it has ever been. And yes, Coppola is very much part of the film establishment. But on a certain level, he deserves some respect for putting his own money on a project in return for creative control, and the ability to take a chance on his ideas.Problem is, Megalopolis in many, many ways feels like an object lesson in what happens when no one is able to tell a filmmaker when his ideas are bad. The movie centers on Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a supposedly visionary city planner who seeks to transform New Rome (basically, New York) over the objections of Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who wants to keep things the way they are. Two prevailing ideas drive Catilina toward transformation. First, he believes New Rome is an empire on the verge of collapse. Second, he thinks his vision for a new architecture — based on a substance called megalon that he has created and that won him a Nobel Prize (in what, is unclear) — can turn the whole place around and create a utopia for everyone. The tension between Catilina and Cicero envelops a cast of secondary characters, most notably a wickedly ambitious journalist named Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza); the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who in time becomes Catilina’s love interest; Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), Catilina’s fabulously wealthy uncle; and Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBouef), Catilina’s cousin, who eventually starts his own fascist organization.Apologies if this makes the movie sound like it has a plot, because none of these characters is much fleshed out beyond caricature — despite the actors’ best efforts, especially Driver, who earns every cent of his paycheck trying to sell this stuff — and not a single idea is truly activated in a way that creates movement. Plenty of stuff happens. There are big parties, a couple buildings get knocked down and new ones get built, a Russian satellite falls on the city. But none of it adds up to a meaningful story. Catilina is even given a superpower — the first thing we learn about him is that he can stop time — and Coppola makes sure that he never does anything useful with it, or anything at all. The script problems persist all the way down to virtually all the individual lines, an astonishingly high percentage of which are total clunkers, full of pseudoprofundities that eventually collapse under their own pretentious weight if discussed for long enough. The script is so lost in its own convolutions that, halfway through the movie, I wondered if Megalopolis was maybe a satire of a pretentious movie. It’s not; it’s just pretentious.Perhaps most disappointing is that Megalopolis often looks kind of cheap and dated, a little too much like a mid-tier TV show. The production design looks gaudy. The CGI isn’t close to the standards we’re used to in 2024. The camera moves are stiff. The lighting is unnatural in a way that calls attention to its artifice. Somewhat like the ill-advised Star Wars movies George Lucas insisted on directing himself in 1999 and the early 2000s, there is a keen sense of a once cutting-edge director having been away from the game a little too long, and now not really knowing how to handle the new possibilities film presents. The problem comes into focus when Catilina begins building his city of the future. He wants to show us something new, just as Coppola wants us to know something groundbreaking about the role of the artist in changing society. But we’ve already seen it and heard it all before.All of which would have made Megalopolis prime arthouse fare, an ideal movie to dissect in the lobby afterward — especially since, based on the film’s mixed reviews, surely there was someone in the theater who was swept away by it in a way that I wasn’t, someone who could articulate why it worked for them, and perhaps help me see it in a different way. As it was, I strolled out of Cinemark without talking about it with anyone. We dispersed having seen something together. But we didn’t know what everyone else had seen.