Last week I attended a preview screening of a bold, epic new film about a temperamental and uncompromising architect and the narrow-minded forces arrayed against him: The Butalist, Directed by Brady Corbet, it stars Adrien Brody as a ghostly, Bauhaus-trained Holocaust refugee genius, some sharp supporting performances from Felicity Jones and Joe Alwyn, and a career-defining performance from Guy Pearce as a wealthy Pennsylvania businessman who becomes Brody’s patron. It is The master hits The source head, And – especially since Corbet went to the trouble of shooting it in VistaVision, a large-format IMAX precursor from the 1950s that is now used primarily, if at all, for VFX shots – it’s worth seeing on the biggest screen , which you can find when it opens at the end of December.

The year other The great architect film is, of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-long passion project megalopolis, starring Adam Driver as a troubled visionary who wants to use time-wasting sci-fi technology to rebuild a Manhattan-like city called New Rome in the spirit of the “Society if…” meme; Giancarlo Esposito as a narrow-minded mayor who would rather appease the bread-and-circus crowd with casinos; and a huge, star-studded supporting cast. After an intriguingly rocky rollout (general Cannes reviews, accusations in the industry that Coppola had frustrated the crew by lounging around his trailer smoking weed – let him cook! – and even more serious allegations of on-set misconduct leading up to it ). Coppola will file a lawsuit against Variety, plus an even stranger scandal involving AI-generated quotes from film critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert), is in theaters this weekend and you should see it immediately. Don’t look at the tweets, don’t look at Letterboxd, don’t look at Rotten Tomatoes – just go to a theater and see it for yourself.

To be clear, I’m not saying you should watch it immediately out of respect for Coppola and his legacy. Or that you should see it because by watching it you are somehow helping to get other films like this financed and released into theaters. That won’t happen Be any other films like this – even if Megalopolis $4 billion, even if we all get together and charter shuttle buses to take public school students and seniors to the movies to send a message to Hollywood, that doesn’t happen. The hilarious more-more-more madness that permeates every frame of this film will disappear from the face of the earth the day Coppola’s eyes are closed. Sometimes Megalopolis feels like the stoned movie fever dream that’s been running through the author’s head in the seconds leading up to the sweet pineal DMT kicking in. And that is Why do you have to watch it?

The brutalistThe look at power, dominance and abuse feels entirely contemporary, but such is the 36-year-old Corbet’s calm command of the medium that one could mistake his third film for a career-defining work by an old master, based on a life story of Corbet’s experience ; megalopolis, On the other hand, it is a film of one actually Old master, 85 years old, this feels more like the work of an excited millennial prodigy, a galaxy-brained cinephile hotshot who has inhaled every Coppola film and is convinced he can beat the maestro at his own game. It’s as artistic as Rumblefish (Francis’s favorite Coppola film and Sofia’s too), but it utilizes the visual language and world-building capabilities of the modern CGI blockbuster. With its angry mobs, anthropomorphized statues, and retro-futuristic architecture, New Rome feels more than a little like Gotham City; among many other things, Megalopolis is the greatest audition imaginable Batman Films made by someone who probably has no desire at all.

For a film inspired by classical antiquity that has been nearly 40 years in the making, its references feel thoroughly modern; I thought about it metropolis but also about The matrix, Sky Captain and the world of tomorrow, and even The Phantom Menace, by Coppola’s old pal George Lucas, another filmmaker whose personal-technological vision quest culminated in actors speaking stiffly in imaginative digital environments; I’ve thought about it too Darkman, Southland Tales, and the dilapidated Capitol The Hunger Games (because of the Rome of the whole thing, but also because of the Jason Schwartzman of the whole thing); and given what the film has to say about the war between fearful and optimistic visions of the future, it was perhaps inevitable that I thought of Donald Trump even before Shia LaBoeuf’s character enters politics and takes on an army of thugs (MEGA chuds? ) puts up red hats.