Adam driver

Megalopolis, which draws parallels between the fall of the Roman empire and modern-day America, is a film by Francis Ford Coppola – and it couldn’t, in fact, be more by Francis Ford Coppola if it tried. He wrote, produced, directed and self-financed it ($120 million; ouch) and even found the time to be its greatest fan. On the film review sharing platform Letterboxd he has awarded it five stars. Way to go, Francis. We’re behind you even though, to be honest, you lost us quite early on. The movie is often baffling, and plainly nuts, but I’d prefer to see something baffling and plainly nuts by Francis Ford Coppola than, say, sit through Dune again.

This Friday sees the Cannes premiere of a film that, by rights, really ought not to exist. As the likes of its stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Dustin Hoffman and Shia LaBeouf all assemble on the Croisette, it will be its now eighty-five-year-old director, screenwriter and producer, Francis Ford Coppola, who will be the most closely watched figure of the night, if not the entire festival. Megalopolis, the movie that they are all gathering to promote, has been Coppola’s great passion project all through his career. He first came up with the idea in 1977, began to develop it in 1983 and, finally, sold part of his wine empire a few years ago to raise the film’s $120 million budget.

Growing up, one of my favorite books was Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, the story of a boy whose plane crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness and who must then fend for survival with only a single tool. 65 tries to pull off something similar, but with dinosaurs and sci-fi weapons. And bizarrely enough, it's a far better B-movie than it has any right to be. Yes, the setup of this film is seriously convoluted. Adam Driver stars as Mills, a long-haul space shipper who works for a spacefaring human civilization based on a planet other than Earth. When his vessel collides with an unexpected asteroid belt, he’s forced to crash-land on Earth — 65 million years before the present day. That’s right: this film takes place a long time ago, but in a galaxy not quite so far away.

Thirty years after it was first released in America, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is returning to theaters, appropriately enough for a Halloween re-release. (It also serves as a soft preview for Coppola’s newly announced passion project, Megalopolis, an epic drama starring Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza.) It is hard to overstate what a difference the past three decades have made in Dracula's popular reception. Although it was a significant commercial hit upon release, thanks in part to Annie Lennox’s enormously popular theme tune "Love Song For a Vampire," it was critically derided as poorly acted, overblown, excessively bloody without being frightening and a travesty of the original novel.

Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci has been much anticipated. The cast is stellar. It’s based on a luscious, true story (so juicy) featuring vicious family infighting and culminating in a murder. I was thinking Succession, but with luxury leather goods and the hiring of a hit man. It can’t miss, I was thinking. Except it can. Not entirely. It has its moments. But the middle act drags (it’s two hours and 40 minutes long) and also the decision to have the English-speaking cast a-speak-a in Italian accents may not have been the wisest one. There were many times I thought Gino D’Acampo was in the room-a. This stars Lady Gaga and she really stars.

Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is set in the 14th century and is a tale of rivalry and rape told from three points of view, when two would probably have been sufficient. The best is saved to last, perhaps unforgivably. It’s the woman’s story, starring Jodie Comer who is sensational, so do hang on in there for that. However, I can’t guarantee that you won’t have severe battle-scene fatigue by then.

Leos Carax is the director whose films have always been wilfully odd. Ron and Russell Mael (the brothers from the band Sparks) have also always been wilfully odd. Annette is a collaboration between the three and is therefore wilfully odd in spades. Starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, it is a fantastical, fever-dreamish, sung-through rock opera and I bet you won’t see a more wilfully odd film this year. As regular readers will know, I am generally fond of any film that busts all known Hollywood formats. Yet while I tried with every fibre of my being to like Annette I did not entirely succeed. The original idea came from the Mael brothers who are currently enjoying a moment, having been the subject of a recent Edgar Wright documentary.