REVIEWS. From the Ridiculous to the Sublime? "Megalopolis" and "The Outrun."

Director Francis Ford Coppola could never be accused of being subtle. His grand, romantic vision of the world can be experienced through multiple genres, from gangster noir (The Godfather Trilogy) to horror (Bram Stoker's Dracula) to biopic (Tucker: A Man and His Dream) to rom-com (Peggy Sue Got Married). Compared to the grittier, austere street worlds of fellow contemporary director Martin Scorsese, Coppola is nothing if not operatic in his view of life, death, violence and love. You can feel his passion filtered through every single nuance, from camera angle to lighting, music and scoring to final editing. Everything is elevated to a grander scale.

And so it is with his latest (some think potentially final) film project, the futuristic Megalopolis, which premiered earlier this year to mixed reviews at the Cannes Film Festival, and which attempts to place the grandeur of New Rome in the designs of architectural genius Caesar Catilina whose plans to create a utopian society clash with the city's corrupt mayor, Franklyn Cicero. Any references to the Catilinarian Conspiracy that plagued Ancient Rome in 63 BC as it transitioned from Roman Republic to Roman Empire are pure intentional.

Coppola has been developing this film since the late 1970s, when he began identifying similarities between the fall of the Roman Empire and the United States' future. I seem to remember, as a college freshman back then, sitting in an American History class and hearing my professor, Howard Ellis, talking about parallels between the United States and Rome, especially since the longest republic in history only lasted 200 years. Would American survive beyond the dreaded second century? Or were the Watergate Scandal, the Vietnam War, and the growing dissension among Amrericans with their government signals that American civilization, as we knew it, was nearing its end? Almost fifty years later, we are revisiting that fear as we prepare to elect a new president. Cycles of history, yes?

Anyway, Coppola's passion project, though decades in the making, may not provide the payoff - symbolic or otherwise - that the director intended. Despite a solidly stoic, if conflicted, performance from the reliable Adam Driver (Caesar Catilina), a Who's Who of Cameos (from Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Fishbourne to Talia Shire and Jason Schwartzman - the latter two are mother and son and Coppola's sister and nephew, respectively), and a mesmerizing set that takes Fritz Lang's 1926 classic, Metropolis to new levels of soundstage futurism, Megalopolis never quite comes together with a cohesive, engaging narrative.

Don't get me wrong. The movie has moments, for sure. Unfortunately, the most compelling one happens within the first five minutes, as Caesar - who has discovered he can stop time - ventures onto the ledge of a skyscraper and proceeds to lean over, stopping himself in mid-fall. Coppola's set creates both the expansiveness of being at the top of a tall building and the mental claustrophobia of Caesar's experiment, as he plays a kind of Russian roulette with his time-stopping capability. I can only confirm the success of the scene's intended suspense by my acrophobic husband's response: he couldn't watch Caesar's flirtation with a deathly fall.

The problem with Megalopolis, besides the overbearing obviousness of the movie's conceit, is that it never really gels into a compelling story. Coppola has paid homage throughout to other great films and filmmakers, including Orson Welles (there's a Citizen Kane-esque narrator and various camera shots that play around with time and space), the aforementioned Fritz Lang's Metropolis' whose sepia tones and visual German expressionism evoked, a century ago, a revelatory futuristic dystopia, and touches of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, the similar tale of a genius architect butting heads with the political establishment.

Yet, for all its gravitas and cinematic lineage, Megalopolis unfolds as a random series of scenes that don't always drive the plot or enhance the story. There's a lot of excess here in a movie that lumbers along at almost two and a half hours of incohesive stuff. It's almost as bad (but not quite) as Damien Chazelle's recent opus taediosus, Babylon, with Coppola showing more restraint and a more consistent theme in his depiction of the enduring battle between individualism v. political corruption than Chazelle's biblical interpretation of artistic talent and the early Hollywood film industry.

In both films, though, I couldn't help but wonder why directors can't seem to capture an orgy with any more than tedious voyeurism. Ditto Stanley Kubrick in 1999's Eyes Wide Shut (similarly, a lifelong pet project of Kubrick's). Whatever lust/desire is running through the mind of the director never seems to translate into anything that's more than dull. Maybe I'm just an American limited by the old romantic "tease," but I'll take Robert Redford washing Meryl Streep's hair in Out of Africa as infinitely sexier and more erotic than anything these three directors have cobbled together as representative of sexual indulgence.

At any rate, Megalopolis had a dismal opening weekend box office return of about $4 million. Keep in mind that Coppola sold one of his vineyards to finance the movie when other investors repeatedly turned him away. Maybe he should have heeded their disinterest. While I appreciated Coppola's use of multiple, sometimes overlapping, cinematic allusions, his affection for utilizing a film set as opposed to shooting on location, and the historical allegory implicit in the story, Megalopolis is more experiment than result, and more time wasted that well spent... or even stopped, if only for a moment.

Much more subtle than Coppola in her use of myth and biologic symbolism (though not entirely so), is director Nora Fingscheidt in her drama, The Outrun, a gripping, if scattered, tale of a young woman's (Saoirse Ronan) struggle with alcoholism. Based on Daisy Lewis' (also a co-writer on the film) 2016 memoir of the same name, the film premiered at this year's Sundance Festival to positive reviews overall, mostly for Ronan's moving portrait of Rona, whose return to her parents' home in the Orkney Islands (Scotland) after a stint in rehab forms the very loose narrative that drives the story.

Largely impressionistic, punctuated by Rona's intermittent memories of her life, told through the hazy veil of an alcoholic stupor, The Outrun succeeds in its ability to explore the affects of the bruised female psyche. Rona recalls the loneliness and isolation of a childhood characterized by a bipolor (and thus emotionally unavailable) father, whom she feared and adored, and a mother desperately, and not always successfully, trying to cope with a mentally distressed spouse and a dependent child. A college graduate with a Masters degree in marine biology, Rona juxtaposes many of her observations against biological facts, theory and myths. Did you know that, when people drown, they turn into seals and then, when all is quiet at night, they slip their skins away and return to earth, trying desperately not to be seen, lest they become trapped?

And trapped, of course, is where Rona finds herself: trying to reconcile her addiction to the life that brought her to that point, attempting to understand her mother's reliance to the Bible, even though she rejects everything about that devotion, continuing to forge a relationship with her father, despite his inability to return her affection. Trapped, indeed. Symbols abound throughout Rona's flashbacks, underscoring her need to find meaning and purpose in her existence.

It's a heavy, and sometimes, unpleasant story to watch deconstructed, as Rona's memory jumps back and forth in time and situation: the only way to stay on track with the plot is to pay attention to her hair, whose style and color identifies most closely the stage in her life she is reflecting on or moving toward. I've never minded non-linear storytelling, especially when used to effective results. Here, though, co-writer/director Fingscheidt is so generous with and, perhaps, enamoured by, her own sense of cinematic imagery, that we get lost in the randomness of Rona's memory. It is, simultaneously, horrifying and riveting, but also often incoherent.

At the center of this scatological remembrance is Saiorse Ronan's magnificent, heartbreaking performance. The four-time Oscar nominee is likely to be on the short list when this year's nominations for Best Actress are announced, but I'm not sure the movie will gain widespread audience interest or a healthy box office return. This is a tough film to watch and reminded me of Gary Oldman's gut-wretching performance as punk rocker Sid Vicious in 1985's Sid and Nancy. For two hours, director Alex Cox invites us to watch to addicts descend into darkness, death and oblivion. It's decidedly unpleasant to experience, but the power of its message stayed with me long after I left the theater.

The Outrun takes us down the same kind of long and winding road, with redemption never promised, though the ending suggests a thin, if elusive, ray of hope. Still, it's hard to imagine any variation of a happy ending for a woman who claims she's never been happy sober and for whom the desolate Orkney Islands are the place she returns to heal. Maybe it's best if the seal is left unseen and the seaweed harvested to ecological use.

In either case, if you must, I would recommend seeing both Megalopolis and The Outrun in a theater, as Coppola's intricate set designs are likely less stunning on TV, and Fingsheidt's breathtakingly isolated cinematography needs the big screen to underscore the magnitude of Rona's lonely, solo journey. But I won't sugar coat either: these are complex movies with themes that do not always provide resolution or logical, narrative development. Megalopolis is what I'd call a "head" movie, an intellectual exercise examining personal ambition against the corruption of the Establishment; The Outrun is an almost sterile, detached internal study that leaves the viewer at an emotional distance. If you're comfortable with that kind of movie experience: ambiguity, detachment, a lack of neatness in terms of plot intention, and little, if any, satisfying entertainment value, you might give one or both of these films a try. If so, I'd recommend The Outrun over Megalopolis unless you are a real cinemaphile who loves the intricies of film style and obscure references to movies past.

One more thing: I will say that Coppola's story cops out at the end with a terrible throwback remniscent of1930's screwball comedies, and why I always turn off Mr. Deeds Goes to Town before the final scene. Why do men think that women are only happy when they find true love and have babies? Sigh. Oh, well. Oops! I should have said, "Spoiler alert."

But what do I know? I'm just one of those "childless cat ladies."