It’s an enthralling, powerful miracle of a movie.

| Jan 11, 2025

Years and years from now, when Coppola’s budget and his problems have long been forgotten, “Apocalypse” will still stand, I think, as a grand and grave and insanely inspired gesture of filmmaking.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 23, 2024

It's precisely in the last 25 minutes that Apocalypse Now dissolves into gibberish. I've seen the film three times with two different endings, and neither ending has been satisfactory. That's because the problem with the picture isn't at its very end.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 23, 2024

Some critics fault Coppola for not delivering a seamless, flawless film. But this is to misperceive and misread the film in a crucial way. The film by definition couldn't be flawless. It attempts too much.

| Sep 23, 2024

Coppola has used the Hollywood genius, which is for films of action and adventure, and built into it something for which Hollywood usually has small talent, namely a philosophical meditation.

| Sep 23, 2024

Some ultimate and flawless perfection may have been missed. But as a noble use of the medium and as a timeless expression of a national anguish, it towers over anything that has been attempted by an American film maker in a very long time.

| Sep 23, 2024

Though as high art this movie may have its problems, it is a complete movie, a huge piece of work that is at once a technical masterpiece and a thing of lyrical, lethal beauty. This will be the film to see in 1979.

| Sep 23, 2024

Apocalypse Now is emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty. It is not so much an epic account of a grueling war as an incongruous, extravagant monument to artistic self-defeat.

| Sep 23, 2024

Decompression [after leaving the theater] takes a long time. You're still submerged for quite a while in its climate of oppressive sin and maddened dissolution... The parking lot doesn't seem quite like a parking lot.

| Sep 23, 2024

Francis Ford Coppola has made a magnificent movie -- not necessarily apocalyptic, but definitely a humane exploration of a most inhumane topic.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 23, 2024

A sour, sad muddle. The battle scenes are arresting, if you're into battle scenes. But oh, that dreary philosophy that wrecks the final 30 minutes.

| Sep 23, 2024

More than any movie I've ever seen, Apocalypse Now lessens the distance between civilian and soldier. Simply put, it makes war on an audience, and this gives the film great power and great beauty.

| Sep 23, 2024

As entertainment, "Apocalypse" is spectacular and seductive, a fictional travelogue through the nightmares of warfare, with threads of reality blended with fantasy.

| Sep 23, 2024

One of the very few must-see movies of 1979. It's brilliant, beautiful, thought-provoking and superbly acted, a horror movie and an adventure story, an important Vietnam War document.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 23, 2024

At once a major cinematic achievement and a major disappointment.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 23, 2024

Apocalypse Now is a vast, extravagant, film masterpiece. Its concept, theme, and structure, is built on the magnificent scale of the grandest opera.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 23, 2024

Although he is far too fond pink smoke and fire, Mr. Coppola's control of actors and scene, finely photographed by Vittorio Storaro and backed by Wagnerian-like music, is never in doubt -- until the final stages.

| Sep 23, 2024

Apocalypse Now is flawed, certainly, but more often than not it is a prime example of filmmaking at its best.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 23, 2024

Flaws and all, the genius of Coppola and his team can still enrich, stimulate, depress, provoke, horrify, probe. The faces will burn in memory; the places as well. Since film is a visual medium, that, perhaps, is enough.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 23, 2024

The resulting disappointment is a harsher blow than usual. What has gone before is so good that you passionately want the whole thing to be terrific. Until the last quarter spoils it, Apocalypse Now is simply one of the greatest movies ever made.

| Sep 23, 2024