Extratextual

"What these films crucially lack-as do other high-profile competition titles such as Yorgos Lanthimos's bludgeoningly literal conspiracy theory thriller Bugonia, 2025-is something that Coppola is heard championing throughout Megadoc: fun. "Moviemaking is not work, it's play," the eighty-six-year-old director says at one point in Figgis's film. "Everything human beings have done throughout history that was worth anything came about during play. Never work, never toil. Toil gives you nothing. Play gives you everything.""

"In Park's No Other Choice, 2025, a middle-aged father (Lee Byung-hun), after being fired from his job at a paper factory, decides to murder his fellow applicants for a new job at a rival company. Despite its implicit capitalist critique, the film never takes itself too seriously, and in fact only stumbles when Park indulges his more heavy-handed stylistic tics-restless camera movements, exaggerated tonal shifts-when a more austere presentation could have sharpened the film's darkly comedic edge."

MIKE FIGGIS'S MEGADOC (2025) chronicles Francis Ford Coppola's self-funded $120 million Megalopolis (2024) and appeared at the Eighty-Second Venice Film Festival. The festival leaned toward inventive nonfiction and away from extravagant narrative spectacle. Several so-called statement films, including Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and Mona Fastvold's The Testament of Ann Lee, failed to convey a sense of fun. Coppola promotes play over toil in moviemaking, arguing that play yields cultural value. Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice stood out as a satisfying, darkly comic exception, despite occasional stylistic excesses.

Read at Artforum