Last week I had the opportunity to attend a preview of a daring, epic new film about a temperamental and uncompromising architect and the petty forces that oppose him: the butalist, directed by Brady Corbet, starring Adrien Brody as a tortured, Bauhaus-trained Holocaust refugee genius, sharp supporting work from Felicity Jones and Joe Alwyn, and a career-defining performance from Guy Pearce as the wealthy Pennsylvania businessman who becomes Brody’s patron. Are The Master meet The fountain, and – especially since Corbet went to the trouble of shooting it in VistaVision, a larger-format IMAX forerunner of the 1950s, which is now mainly used for VFX shots if it’s used at all – it’s worth see it on the biggest screen you can find when it opens in late December.

The year other The great architectural 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-bending science fiction technology to rebuild a Manhattan-esque city called New Rome in the spirit of the ‘Society if…’ meme; Giancarlo Esposito as the hidden mayor who prefers to satisfy the bread-and-circus crowd with casinos; and a massive, star-studded supporting cast. After a fascinatingly shaky rollout (reviews in Cannes, accusations in the trade about Coppola frustrating the crew by smoking weed in his caravan – let him cook! – and more serious allegations of misconduct on set that prompted Coppola to press charges to Variety, plus an even stranger scandal involving AI-generated quotes from film critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert), the film hits theaters this weekend and you should see it right away. Don’t look at the tweets, don’t look at Letterboxd, don’t look at Rotten Tomatoes – just go to a theater and see for yourself.

To be clear, I’m not saying you should see it right away out of respect for Coppola and his legacy. Or that you should see it, because by seeing it you will somehow help other films like this get financed and distributed to theaters. That won’t happen are all other movies like this, even if Megapolis makes 4 billion dollars, even if we all get together and charter shuttle buses to take kids and seniors from public schools to the movie theater to send a message to Hollywood, that won’t happen. The ancient more-more-more madness that is present in every frame of this film will disappear from the earth the day Coppola’s eyes close. Sometimes Megapolis feels like the stoned cinematic fever dream that will flash through the author’s mind in the seconds before that happens, as that sweet pineal DMT takes effect. And that is why you should go see it.

The brutalistThe 36-year-old Corbet’s look at power, dominance and abuse feels entirely contemporary, but the 36-year-old Corbet’s calm command of the medium is such that you could mistake his third film for a career-defining opus from an old master that builds on a lifetime of experience; Megalopolis, on the other hand it is a film by an factual old master, 85 years old, that feels more like the work of an excited millennial prodigy, a galaxy-spanning cinephile hotshot who has inhaled every Coppola film and is convinced he can beat the maestro at his own game. It’s just as artful as Rumbling fish (Francis’ favorite Coppola film, and Sofia’s too), but it uses the visual language and world-building capabilities of the modern CGI blockbuster. With its angry crowds, anthropomorphic statues, and retro-futuristic architecture, New Rome feels more than a little like Gotham City; among many other things, Megapolis is the greatest audition imaginable to direct Batman films from someone who probably doesn’t feel like it.

For a film inspired by classical antiquity that has been almost forty years in the making, the references feel thoroughly modern; I found myself thinking about it Metropolis but also about The matrix, Sky Captain and the world of tomorrow, and even The phantom threat, by Coppola’s old friend George Lucas, another filmmaker whose search for a personal-technological vision culminated in actors speaking stiffly in fantastical digital environments; I also thought about Darkman, Southland Tales, and out of the riotous Capitol The Hunger Games (because of the Rome of it all, but also because of the Jason Schwartzman of it all); and, perhaps inevitably, given what the film has to say about the war between fearful and optimistic visions of the future, I thought of Donald Trump even before Shia LaBoeuf’s character entered politics and created an army of thugs (MEGA-chuds? ) brought into being. red hats.