Average Rating: 8.9/10
Reviews Counted: 74
Fresh: 73 | Rotten: 1
Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, hallucinatory Vietnam War epic is cinema at its most audacious and visionary.
Average Rating: 8.4/10
Critic Reviews: 11
Fresh: 10 | Rotten: 1
Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, hallucinatory Vietnam War epic is cinema at its most audacious and visionary.
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Average Rating: 4.1/5
User Ratings: 241,059
One of a cluster of late-1970s films about the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now adapts the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness to depict the war as a descent into primal madness. Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen), already on the edge, is assigned to find and deal with AWOL Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), rumored to have set himself up in the Cambodian jungle as a local, lethal godhead. Along the way Willard encounters napalm and Wagner fan Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), draftees who
Jan 1, 1979 Wide
Nov 20, 2001
United Artists
All Critics (74) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (82) | Rotten (1) | DVD (53)
Alternately a brilliant and bizarre film, Francis Coppola's four year 'work in progress' offers the definitive validation to the old saw, 'war is hell.'
Apocalypse Now did help provide me, and many of my generation, with a vision of what film art could achieve, a vision so magnificent it doomed us to spend much of our subsequent moviegoing lives in a funk.
The opening, with the whirling sound of choppers intercut with Willard sweating angst in his Saigon hotel bed, a jungle burning with napalm...remains a visual and aural wonder.
Apocalypse Now is a mixed bag, a product of excess and ambition, hatched in agony and redeemed by shards of brilliance.
What the excitement was about was the unspoken belief that this film would put a cap on the most exciting decade in American film, that it would sum up everything that had come before and influence everything that came after...
...the movie still has the power to floor you with its stunning sounds and imagery.
Perhaps Francis Ford Coppola's greatest directorial achievement, Apocalypse Now is a visually stunning war film that has no equal, with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro capturing the films Philippine location to great effect.
Apocalypse Now is not merely the greatest film to come out of the Vietnam experience but one of the great works about the madness of our times.
A must-see, preferably in the cinema.
The best of it is grand, mysterious and oddly possessed.
Undoubtedly it is one of the best films about war ever made.
A film that needs to be seen on the big screen.
It is mystical, daring, poetic, thrilling, appalling and never less than utterly mesmerising.
A gilt-edged, no-messing, accept-no-substitutes masterpiece.
Coppola delivered a harrowing masterwork that bursts with malarial, mystical images...
A film of pure sensation, dazzling audiences with light and noise, laying bare the stark horror - and unimaginable thrill - of combat.
This disturbing vision of the harrowing effects of war and violence continues to shock and haunt audiences.
One of the best movies about the Vietnam War, an epic spectacle that's brilliant up to the last reel, when Brando appears.
Disturbing tale of war horrors isn't for kids.
This manifestation of creative determination and hell-on-Earth experience just might reinvigorate your belief that a greater power guides us at our most pivotal times.
All that's missing from this set is a ticket voucher for the film's eventual IMAX re-release.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who recognize Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 war drama as a masterpiece of American cinema, and those whose opinions I don't quite trust.
There is greatness in Apocalypse Now, but there is also madness, and they feed off each other.
The movie Francis Ford Coppola never recovered from, and the last word in Ci-Nam-a.
An epic masterpiece that not only shows the horrors of war but the dark insanity that exists within the human soul. The movie masterfully captures the unforgiving chaos of war and its horrors. It is not just a movie about Vietnam War, it is an allegorical journey into the human soul. At times it feels more like a
October 5, 2011Super Reviewer
Apocalypse Now is tied with Saving Private Ryan as my favorite war film ever made, and is just a pure work of genius in every way possible. The plot is a great one, it may be just about a man being assigned to kill a soldier gone rogue, but it is much more than that, the greatest thing about the film is by far the
August 15, 2011
Super Reviewer
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