THE CURRENT CINEMA APOCALYPSE WHEN

“Megalopolis.”

- JUSTIN CHANG

Adam Driver stars in Francis Ford Coppola’s film.

The subject of “Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature in thirteen years, is time. The movie begins with an image of a large city clock, and Coppola repeatedly invokes time’s relentless forward march. Yet the very nature of the movie, which is by turns aggressively heady, stubbornly illogical, and beguilingly optimistic, is to question our understanding of time as a finite resource. It muses about how we as people designers, builders, inventors, artists might succeed in circumventing time and bring about a utopia that resists the natural slide toward entropy.

Coppola's protagonist is a controversial architect and designer named Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who has the ability to pause time. "Time, stop!" he says, and everything freezes: people, cars, the clouds in the sky, even the crumbling of a public-housing development that was being demolished on Cesar's own orders. But his supernatural powers are limited. Eventually, he must allow time to start up again, with a reluctant snap of his fingers. (The film is laden with references to Shakespeare, Emerson, and Sapphic poetry, but the temporal gimmickry reminded me, irresistibly, of the late-eighties sitcom “Out of This World.”)