WITHOUT exaggeration friends, this week is one that I have been awaiting for more than a decade.

Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) sees the release of his magnum opus, Megalopolis, a film that has been more than 40 years in the making.

A passion project from a filmmaker who is responsible for much of the language of modern cinema, Coppola has been in a sort of semi-retirement for well over a decade, being famously uninterested working within the constraints of the Hollywood studio system.

This film, however, has been the great, unrealised project of his for so long that he felt it was worth selling a portion of his family’s winery to finance the production himself.

The result is a science-fiction epic that explores the cost of human societies, and the price we are willing to pay to change them.

Starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, John Voight, Laurence Fishburne and a host of other famous faces keen to get in on this piece of work from one of cinema’s great masters, you can expect a deeply contemplative and emotional experience.

Ramping up the tension this week is Never Let Go, a survival-horror thriller starring Halle Berry from noted French horror director Alexandre Aja.

Years after an unknown “evil” apparently ended human civilisation, ‘Momma’ lives in a woodland cabin with twin boys Nolan and Samuel (played by Percy Daggs IV and Anthony B. Jenkins), paranoid that the entity will destroy them if they stray from their home.

The trailer makes clear that the film plays with the trope “Who is the real evil?”, as the boys begin to doubt Momma’s sincerity, and the audience will be asking the question “Is the evil all in her mind?”

Aja pulled this trick with his debut feature Haute Tension, but he is capable of handling cliches with a subtle touch, and Berry has always been a supremely adaptable actor.

Sadly, I have the duty to inform you that apparently we still live in an era when tired internet gags regarding briefly notable celebrities of the 80’s and 90’s are enough to get production greenlit on a feature film, with Zombie Plane making an appearance in maybe one or two cinemas in the country for a week before being shuffled directly to a free streaming service like Tubi or Plex.

Vanilla Ice stars as himself (oh good lord) alongside Sophie Monk as herself (really?), with both Chuck Norris and Mike Tyson appearing as themselves in a film based on, insanely, a real life incident about six years old.

Ice was a passenger on a very real flight in the US on which a massive outbreak of influenza caused a major quarantine situation upon landing in New York.

This film “reveals” the truth – that Vanilla Ice is in fact a government agent trained by Chuck Norris, and the contagion was actually a Zombie virus outbreak, and apparently he teamed up with persistent Aussie celebrities to deal with the crisis.

Will the humour and computer generated gore be worth the price of a ticket? No, almost certainly it will not, but in a free society I am forced to leave that choice to you.

Restoring faith in human creativity, however, is the indie sci-fi comedy drama My Old Ass.

On a camping trip with friends Elliot (Maisy Stella) takes mushrooms, but rather than having a psychedelic trip she encounters her future self (played by Aubrey Plaza) who takes the opportunity to attempt to offer life advice to her younger self.

It may not have simply been the drugs talking, as following an introduction to Chad (Percy Hynes-White) – a boy that future Elliot warned her young self to avoid – young Elliot receives a phone call from her future self, who is determined not to let the mistakes of the past go unaddressed.

Writer and director Megan Park is putting together an exploration of the way we anticipate our life-to-be, alongside the regret we deal with when considering what could-have-been.

This looks to be a little gem with a lot of humour, some genuine humanity and might even actually have something worth saying.

By Lindsay HALL