Francis Ford Coppola made it. He’s been trying to make it, in fact, for 40 years or more. And it seems as if he has stuffed every single idea he had in the meantime into the movie, plus a few more. To say it’s all over the place is a huge understatement.

There are two ways to look at "Megalopolis," the long-gestating passion project from master filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola that opens Friday. On the one hand, it's an ambitious, bold, bizarrely idiosyncratic vision,