Finally learned who is this Zendaya cultural phenom you speak of. I was briefly outraged to learn she was dating Tom Holland, until I figured out that Tom Hollander is who I was thinking of - a 56 year old actor who was so great as the gaffe-prone government minister in In the Loop. I simply couldn't picture him dating Zendaya, and was in that moment of confusion prepared to condemn him as a cradle robbing beast.

Many reviews were blisteringly bad. Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian called it “megabloated and megaboring.” Tim Grierson for Screen Daily called it a “disaster” “stymied by arbitrary plotting and numbing excess.” Kevin Maher for the Times of London wrote that it’s a “head-wrecking abomination.” Critic Jessica Kiang said “Megalopolis” “is a folly of such gargantuan proportions it’s like observing the actual fall of Rome.”

But some critics responded with admiration for the film’s ambition. With fondness, New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri said the film “might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” David Ehrlich for IndieWire praised a “creatively unbound approach” that “may not have resulted in a surplus of dramatically coherent scenes, but it undergirds the entire movie with a looseness that makes it almost impossible to look away.”

“Is it a distancing work of hubris, a gigantic folly, or a bold experiment, an imaginative bid to capture our chaotic contemporary reality, both political and social, via the kind of large-canvas, high-concept storytelling that’s seldom attempted anymore?” wrote David Rooney for The Hollywood Reporter. “The truth is it’s all those things.”