Every Francis Ford Coppola Film Ranked From Worst to Best

23. ‘Jack’ (1996)

Possibly the most mawkish and unpleasant children’s film ever made, ‘Jack’ is the only movie in Coppola’s arsenal that has no merits whatsoever. Made during the director’s commercial ’90s phase while he was attempting to get out of debt so he could make ‘Megalopolis,’ the film features Robin Williams at his absolute worst, playing a 10-year-old boy with a rare condition that rapidly aged him to 40 years old. It’s an inherently sad premise rendered irritating by Williams’ screechy, hyperactive, unwatchable performance, and the bizarre focus on Jack’s access to sexuality and women through his condition only deepens how uncomfortable the viewing experience is. Coppola himself doesn’t do much to elevate the material; it’s a straight-down-the-middle disaster. —WC

22. ‘Twixt’ (2011)

You can’t begrudge ‘Twixt’ as an unimaginative affair, exactly. Coppola’s last film for a long, long time before ‘Megalopolis’ finally got off the ground is a bizarro horror film that mixes Edgar Allen Poe, gimmicky 3D sequences, and a variety of references to classic horror like ‘Nosferatu’ to very little memorable effect. Starring Val Kilmer as a failing novelist who gets wrapped up in an unsolved murder mystery in a small town, it’s more idea than film, a half-baked collection of imagery that never amounts to that much. There’s some novelty here, but the fatal sin of ‘Twixt’ is that, despite its weirdness, it’s boring more than it is amusing. —WC

21. ‘You’re a Big Boy Now’ (1966)

An early work from Coppola, ‘You’re a Big Boy Now’ doesn’t have much in common with the director’s later career triumphs: considering it’s a literal student film the director made while completing an MFA at UCLA, perhaps that’s not surprising. Based on a book by David Benedictus, the film feels like a reflection for where Coppola was at in his life at the time, starring Peter Kastner as a nerdy boy moving into a new apartment in Manhattan to start his adulthood and hopefully lose his virginity while having to deal with his terminally overbearing parents. A bawdy comedy, ‘You’re a Big Boy Now’ isn’t particularly memorable, but it’s an amusing trifle, with a loose storyline that allows for weird gags and a quick, zippy pace. —WC

20. ‘Dementia 13’ (1963)

Even if you didn’t know that Coppola got his start with a Roger Corman-produced horror film, it makes a peculiar amount of sense. You can feel Corman’s gonzo, cult-film sensibilities in so many of Coppola’s works, from the lush visuals of ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ to the wild swings of ‘Rumble Fish’ That said, the film Coppola actually made with Corman is decidedly not one of his best. Made in nine days in Ireland and reshot by Corman to get it into a releasable state, ‘Dementia 13’ is a riff on ‘Psycho’ that follows a widow traveling to Ireland for her husband’s inheritance and finds danger and murder instead. There are some inventive sequences, and a low-budget B-movie charm that’s undeniable, but on a whole, the edges around the film could not be any rougher. —WC

19. ‘Youth Without Youth’ (2007)

A decade after his commercial phase ended with ‘The Rainmaker,’ Coppola’s ‘Youth Without Youth’ reintroduced him to cinemas in his elder statesman phase. A few minutes of the beguiling film and it becomes clear that Coppola now has little interest in making films to please the masses. A confusingly written, barely coherent story of an elderly Romanian linguistics professor who gets struck by lightning and regenerated into a younger man with psychic powers, ‘Youth Without Youth’ mixes Nazis, reincarnation, and a lot of bizarre stuff about the evolutionary track of humanity. Coppola described the film as a study of consciousness and its relationship with time, but there’s so much going on in the film that it feels like it will buckle over on itself at any moment. Lush visuals make it a treat to watch, but the metaphysical pondering may make your eyes glaze over. —WC

18. ‘The Godfather: Part III’ (1990)

‘The Godfather Part III’ is probably the most disappointing movie in cinematic history. Not that it’s the worst movie in history — it’s decidedly not — but because the decline from the sustained greatness of ‘The Godfather’ and ‘The Godfather Part II’ is so unbelievably glaring. Some of it was probably just timing. The gap between the first two ‘Godfather’ films was a mere two years — it would be another 16 years before we got ‘Part III.’ There was also no real source material for ‘Part III,’ whereas ‘The Godfather’ was a faithful adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name, which also informed much of ‘Part II.’

The magic was gone, as was much of the key cast. The storyline was confusing, and it was apparently made quite a bit worse in post-production. A new edit in 2020 by Coppola, ‘The Godfather Coda,’ fixes much of the film’s contextual issues, as IndieWire film critic David Ehrlich wrote. Then again, Ehrlich also writes that the recut ‘redeems’ daughter Sofia Coppola’s notorious acting performance in the film, although the jury is out on if there’s an editor in the world who can accomplish that. Still, Coppola’s notorious performance in the movie — which saps the film of much of its emotional power — does have a happy ending, as the young teen would become a tremendous director in her own right. —TM 

17. ‘Megalopolis’ (2024)

“As personal and egoless as you could ever hope to expect from an $120 million self-portrait that doubles as a fable about the fall of Ancient Rome, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” is the story of an ingenious eccentric who dares to stake his fortune on a more optimistic vision for the future — not because he thinks he can single-handedly bring that vision to bear, but rather because history has taught him that questioning a civilization’s present condition is the only reliable hope for preventing its ruin. Needless to say, the movie isn’t arriving a minute too soon.”

“After more than 40 years of idly fantasizing about the project (and more than 20 years of actively trying to finance it), Coppola is bringing ‘Megalopolis’ to screens at a moment when his chosen medium is struggling to find a way forward, and the world around it seems teetering on the brink of collapse. Just as in 63 B.C., when an evil patrician named Catiline appealed to a coalition of malcontents in a bid to overthrow the Republic, we are choked by the grip of delusional aristocrats and vertically integrated conglomerates whose lust for power and profit is only matched by their lack of foresight. Even with the past as our guide, we are at imminent risk of allowing the now to destroy the forever.”

“Coppola has always believed in America, but his faith is eroding by the second, and ‘Megalopolis’ is nothing if not the boldest and most open-hearted of his many bids to stop time before it’s too late (an effort that has informed so much of his career, from ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ and ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ to ‘Youth After Youth’ and ‘Jack’). As ever, he recognizes the futility in the attempt, even if his characters are sometimes a bit slow on the uptake.”

“What elevates ‘Megalopolis’ so far above those other films — even ‘Jack’ — is how clearly the constant madness of its folly and the occasional disaster of its design serve as conduits for its writer/director/producer/financier’s entire creative ethos. Coppola might lack the imagination required to invent the new cinema that his new movie so desperately wishes it could will into being (he’s not even De Palma in that respect, let alone Godard), but he’s always seen the need for it better and more urgently than any of his contemporaries.” 

“With ‘Megalopolis,”’he crams 85 years worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire. It doesn’t just speak to Coppola’s philosophy, it embodies it to its bones. To quote one of the sharper non-sequiturs from a script that’s swimming in them: ‘When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.'” —DE

Read IndieWire’s complete review of ‘Megalopolis.’ 

16. ‘The Outsiders’ (1983)

The knock on ‘The Outsiders’ is pretty much entirely because the worst actor had the biggest role. A reminder of the cast: Matt Dillon as Dallas, Ralph Macchio as Johnny, Patrick Swayze as Darrel, Rob Lowe as Sodapop, Emilio Estevez as Two-bit, and Tom Cruise as Steve. It’s an insane young group of actors who would break out into major star — we didn’t even mention Diane Lane as Cherry — and then there was the top-billed lead star: C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy. ‘Nothing gold can stay,’ and Howell can’t act.

Howell aside, ‘The Outsiders’ is an excellent ’60s small-town turf-war film. The problem is you cannot set Howell aside — this was not a Sofia Coppola in ‘The Godfather III’ issue. (Sofia Coppola did appear on screen in ‘The Outsiders’ as a little girl — she’s credited as ‘Domino Coppola’ — and it was common for dad to put her in tiny bit parts in his early films.)

No, in ‘The Outsiders,’ Ponyboy is the character — the one we’re supposed to experience the entire film through. The experience of watching ‘The Outsiders’ varies from scene to scene. If Ponyboy is driving the action, it’s probably not so hot. But give Swayze the meat of the moment and it’s a different story. Overall, the movie works, but it will always be remembered for the order of its call sheet — just like C. Thomas Howell will always be remembered for ‘Soul Man.’ —TM

15. ‘The Rainmaker’ (1997)

Coppola’s last foray with the Hollywood system was mostly a work-for-hire scenario. Based on the John Grisham novel of the same name, ‘The Rainmaker’ follows a young graduate of Memphis State University Law School as he takes on his first cases and comes to understand the legal profession, as well as the characters who occupy it. While other Grisham adaptations of the time such as ‘The Firm,’ ‘A Time to Kill,’ and ‘The Client’ fared much better financially and critically, ‘The Rainmaker’ may be the most accessible courtroom drama of the whole lot. Much of this has to do with the star-making turn from the film’s lead, a young Matt Damon, as well as the strong supporting cast that includes Danny DeVito, Claire Danes, Jon Voight, and Mickey Rourke.

Had the film come out two weeks after Damon’s breakout hit ‘Good Will Hunting’ instead of two weeks before, its box office gross may have looked a whole lot different. Nonetheless, its David vs. Goliath story of a lawyer barely out of school taking on a major health insurance company remains potent, particularly in today’s world where medical care has become a privilege rather than a right we’re all owed. —HR

14. ‘Gardens of Stone’ (1987)

Coppola spent most of the 1980s taking assignments that would enable him to pay down his debt after his studio went under following the box office failure of ‘One From the Heart,’ but he was constitutionally incapable of phoning the jobs in — they all, in one way or another, are personal films, even if they didn’t originate with Coppola. ‘Gardens of Stone,’ a 1986 film about the soldiers who bury other soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, became more personal than Coppola would have liked when his beloved son Gio was killed in a boating accident during production. Perhaps it’s overly facile to say that Gio’s death permeates the film, but there’s no denying that it’s one of Coppola’s most somber, emotionally pained works, a film that breathes tragedy in and out in every frame. It’s a beautiful and devastating meditation on loss, anchored by one of James Caan’s greatest performances in his return to the screen after a five-year absence. —JH

13. ‘Finian’s Rainbow’ (1968)

‘Look to the rainbow,’ goes Yip Harburg’s famous lyric. Much of the starry-eyed optimism, the naïve, searching ethos that powers Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ finds its bookend at the beginning of his career in this adaptation of Harburg and Burton Lane’s 1947 musical. Fred Astaire and Petula Clark play an Irish father and daughter who’ve stolen a leprechaun’s (Tommy Steele) pot of gold and come to the American South. Kind of like a Lucky Charms de Tocqueville, Astaire’s character wryly comments on the peculiarities of America, and his daughter fights back against bigotry by turning a racist white senator Black himself using the magic of the pot of gold.

Okay, that’s a very midcentury liberal idea of exposing racism — walking in another’s shoes will provide the understanding that will end all bigotries! — and one that causes the racist senator character (Keenan Wynn) to appear in blackface for much of the movie. Sure, it’s being used in the way that blackface is used in ‘Tropic Thunder,’ as a social comment, but it’s blackface nonetheless.

It’s the kind of misguided idealism you could see Coppola gravitating toward, even if he’s all but disowned this movie. (For what it’s worth, the Coen brothers are big fans.) But it’s made more interesting by the subversive performance of Al Freeman Jr. as a Black scientist who, before the senator turns Black, is forced into working for him as a servant — Freeman makes a meal out of the performative plantation LARPing he affects to mock the senator’s antebellum fetishes.

And of course, Fred Astaire is wondrous, somehow as radiantly charming as a 70-something as he was decades earlier. Consider that Coppola has had a career stretching from Astaire to Aubrey Plaza soliciting cunnilingus from Shia LaBeouf in ‘Megalopolis.’ As one of the ‘Finian’s’’ lyrics go, ‘Follow that fellow who follows a dream.’ —CB

12. ‘The Cotton Club’ (1984)

Like much of Coppola’s 1980s output, the story behind ‘The Cotton Club’ was more complicated than what audiences in 1984 saw at the multiplex. The film, which took place against the backdrop of the legendary Harlem jazz club of the same name, was produced under tumultuous circumstances, with former Paramount head Robert Evans struggling to cobble together financing for the film in the aftermath of his cocaine trafficking arrest and would-be producer Roy Radin being murdered before production began. In typical Coppola fashion, the shoot went over budget, featured an acrimonious relationship between creatives and financiers, and ultimately prompted the auteur to re-cut the film decades after its initial release.

But look past all the chaos and you’ll find that ‘The Cotton Club’ is one of the best examples of Coppola’s ‘80s ambition. He spent much of the decade experimenting with musicals, beginning with his box office flop ‘One from the Heart.’ ‘The Cotton Club’ uses the musical format in a more grounded way, showing lavish tap dance numbers and beautiful period costumes in a semi-fictional story about musical brilliance and mob brutality in the jazz age. Through its portrayal of Black jazz musicians and the white gangsters who own and patronize their club, the film explores the strained relationships between artists and their financiers in a way that almost certainly provides a window into Coppola’s own struggles. While ‘The Cotton Club’ will never be remembered as Coppola’s best gangster movie, it is nevertheless deserving of a key spot in his filmography. —CZ

11. ‘Tucker: The Man and His Dream’ (1988)

Following the disastrous box office flops of ‘The Cotton Club’ and ‘Gardens of Stone’ and excluding the minor success of ‘Peggy Sue Got Married,’ Coppola needed a hit to rebound from a decade that had seen him mostly working to pay off debts accrued as a result of his investments in his 1982 musical ‘One from the Heart.’ To add to his woes, while Coppola was shooting ‘Gardens of Stone,’ his eldest son Gian-Carlo was killed in a speed-boat accident. Seeking to comfort his friend and collaborator, George Lucas pushed Coppola to work on a passion project they’d been toying with for years: A biopic surrounding the life and legacy of automotive inventor and entrepreneur Preston Tucker.

Mirroring his own life in many ways, Coppola used Tucker’s history to explore themes revolving around ingenuity being stifled for the sake of power and maintaining the status quo. Starring Jeff Bridges in an Academy Award-nominated performance, Tucker is portrayed as both a loving family man and a manic visionary willing to put the cart before the horse if it means people taking his dream of the future seriously. Also featuring performances from Joan Allen, Martin Landau, a young Christian Slater, and Bridges’ father, Lloyd, ‘Tucker: The Man and His Dreams’ may just be Coppola’s most personal film. However, while it fared well critically and financially performed better than most of his ’80s output, it wasn’t enough of a hit to rebound Coppola’s career entirely, forcing him to do something he’d refused to do up until that point: Make ‘The Godfather Part III.’ —HR

10. ‘One From the Heart’ (1982)

After proving the skeptics wrong with ‘Apocalypse Now,’ Coppola took an even bigger roll of the dice on this 1982 musical, buying his own Hollywood studio and betting everything he owned (and then some) on ‘One From the Heart’ as its inaugural film. The movie was a box office failure and forced Coppola to regroup for the rest of the 1980s, but it’s an artistic triumph — a marvel of visual storytelling that’s deeply romantic, intensely personal, and completely awe-inspiring. A love letter to the old Hollywood studio system, it’s a delightful confection in which pure artifice (Coppola built the Las Vegas strip entirely on a sound stage) merges with the most authentic, complex human emotions. Nearly every one of Coppola’s innovations, which were laughed at by the establishment at the time — previsualization, editing on video, etc. — eventually became adopted by the industry at large. Both the movie and the way in which it was made were years ahead of their time. —JH

9. ‘Tetro’ (2009)

Following his return to filmmaking after a 10-year hiatus with ‘Youth Without Youth,’ many were quick to claim Coppola had lost his juice entirely, but rather than dwell in the harsh criticism, he got back to work, putting together a scaled-back ode to family, artistry, and the pain we endure to make others feel whole. Revolving around a young brother (Alden Ehrenreich) who seeks out his elder sibling (Vincent Gallo) in Argentina, ‘Tetro,’ in many ways, carries the freshness of a student film, with Coppola more taken by nuance and thought than crafting a concrete narrative.

Instead what we get is a wildly intimate portrait of a family both bound and disconnected by creativity. While one brother feels it natural to explore these feelings through art, the other is offended by the idea of exposing himself in such a way. Though it’s uncertain how much of the story is true, one can’t help but imagine ‘Tetro’ as a love letter to his own relationship with his elder brother August, whom Coppola said taught him everything he knew. August would pass away shortly following the film’s release, adding further poetic beauty to an already stunningly honest and wholehearted tribute. —HR

8. ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ (1986)

One of the many films Coppola made while he was working off debt in the ’80s, ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ never feels like a work-for-hire situation. Sure, it’s a fairly mainstream studio comedy, but there’s too much joy and too much sorrow, so much palpable emotion in this time travel comedy that bites a bit from ‘Back to the Future,’ to be phoned in. Kathleen Turner gives a tremendous performance as the titular Peggy Sue, who gets turned back in time at her high school reunion to her senior year and is forced to consider whether she should make the same decisions again. At the crux is her relationship with her high school sweetheart (Coppola’s nephew Nicolas Cage) who she’s estranged from in adulthood, and the question of whether or not that love was worth it despite all of the pain. Thoughtful and mature in its look at living with and without regret, ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’s’ bawdy premise masks its status as one of Coppola’s most touching works. —WC

7. ‘The Rain People’ (1969)

An early career triumph from Coppola, ‘The Rain People’ was compared by Roger Ebert at the time of its release to ‘Easy Rider,’ another film about a protagonist on the road through a hazy America. Shirley Knight’s Natalie has much hazier motivations than Peter Fonda’s biker, though: she discovers she’s pregnant, and, without a word to her husband, takes off in the night, going nowhere in particular. Across her journey, she meets other men, like James Caan’s ex-football player or Robert Duvall’s state trooper, and toys with building a life with them even as she seems increasingly adrift. Beautifully shot and featuring a perfectly calibrated performance from Knight, ‘The Rain People’ feels like a reflection of feminism in the late ’60s, a story of a woman on a journey through a new America but unsure of where her place in it truly is. —WC

6. ‘Rumble Fish’ (1983)

The second of two films Coppola made in 1983 adapting the work of novelist S. E. Hinton, ‘Rumble Fish’ feels like the distorted, esoteric sibling to the far more commercially successful ‘The Outsiders.’ Casting the stars of that last film, Matt Dillon and Diane Lane, as a dissatisfied street punk and his girlfriend, ‘Rumble Fish’ follows Dillon as he goes on a crusade around town with his brother (Mickey Rourke). Shot in gorgeous black-and-white like a film noir and edited like a German Expressionist film with an experimental score by Stewart Copeland, ‘Rumble Fish’ feels like an abstract nightmare more than a gang film. Its total abandonment of a real narrative might frustrate, but there’s something beautiful about the movie and its visual storytelling, how it locks you into the mind of its hurting, angry youth. —WC

5. ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)

There are so many ways of approaching ‘Apocalypse Now.’ From its impact on future movies: Every movie made since that in some way has ‘war is a drug’ as a theme, from the works of James Cameron to Paul Verhoeven to Kathryn Bigelow, owes everything to ‘Apocalypse Now.’ To its historical prescience: Martin Sheen’s Willard is the kind of special ops professional soldier that became much of the U.S. fighting force in the years after the draft ended. To its cultural commentary: This is the ultimate end-of-the-counterculture film, as Coppola goes out of his way to show the many ways the cultural possessions of America’s ‘60s youth became coopted by The Man. From Playboy to ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ to, of course, surfing.

That’s a fascinating thing to consider: That for all the utopian, pie-eyed idealism of ‘Megalopolis,’ 45 years earlier Coppola showed the most jaundiced attitude toward flower power feel-goodery. Because ‘Apocalypse Now’ is a film that’s truly hanging over the abyss, that gazes, deeply, maybe even longingly, into it. This is chaos, the movie. And it’s hard to think of other films of its scale before this that simply attempted to have so much happening in the frame and on the soundtrack at any one time: There’s a shot of a preacher giving blessings in a village that’s burning while helicopters buzz around him and whip up sand. Pure freneticism, and powered in large part by Walter Murch’s extraordinary sound editing.

Somehow it all holds together. And if its vision of life as ‘the horror, the horror’ is a bit one-dimensionally horrible, it fits well as a flip side to the utopian, ‘it’s all gonna work out’ vibe of ‘Megalopolis.’ —CB

4. ‘The Godfather: Part II’ (1974)

‘The Godfather Part II’ is one of those incredibly rare sequels that is considered by many to be even greater than its near-perfect predecessor. Even if you don’t share that opinion, you probably think it comes awfully close. ‘Part II’ brought us a young Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando in the original) in the form of a young Robert De Niro. Though De Niro and Al Pacino wouldn’t share any scenes (De Niro’s were flashbacks), it marked the first time the two on-screen-mafia legends were in the same film. The two finally faced off for the first time in 1995’s ‘Heat,’ did the highly forgettable ‘Righteous Kill’ in 2008, and then (more or less) properly reunited for 2019’s ‘The Irishman’ on Netflix. But they were never more compelling together than they were separated by time in Coppola’s film, as mirror images of two men building and being destroyed by a criminal empire. —TM

3. ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (1992)

Coppola’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel is both more faithful to its source that other film versions and 100% a Coppola creation, filled with jaw-dropping images from beginning to end. Utilizing early cinema techniques (with a major assist from his son Roman, who served as visual effects supervisor), Coppola gives the movie an intimate, handmade quality despite its big-budget spectacle; the multiple exposures, miniature work, and matte paintings are a wonder to behold. It helps that Coppola has some of the best collaborators of his career here: Wojciech Kilar’s score is one of the all-time greats (and was pilfered for trailers to other movies for years afterward), Greg Cannom’s makeup for Dracula provides multiple terrifying (and tragic) monsters in one, and Gary Oldman gives one of his best performances in the title role. Like ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ is that rare example of a fully realized masterpiece with widespread popular appeal. —JH

2. ‘The Godfather’ (1972)

From the iconic opening line ‘I believe in America,’ Francis Ford Coppola makes the scope of his ambitions for ‘The Godfather’ abundantly clear. Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name might have been dismissed by Coppola himself as a pulpy crime story that he would have had little interest in adapting were it not for financial pressure. But Coppola took the ball and ran with it, creating a saga of power, family, greed, revenge, and ambition that may well be the closest thing to Shakespeare that America has ever produced. 

The film’s iconic moments are too plentiful to list, but it’s hard to think of many individual films that had a greater impact on pop culture. From horse heads in beds to offers we can’t refuse to outrage about coming to us with violent requests on the day of our daughter’s wedding, ‘The Godfather’ has infiltrated the zeitgeist so deeply that it’s hard to fathom what a risk it was to make. Coppola’s discomfort with the source material stemmed from his disinterest in perpetuating stereotypes about Italian-Americans participating in organized crime, but his hesitance is part of what made the finished product so profound. Rather than dabble in caricatures, he mined the specificity of the mafia (though nobody in the film ever says that term at the request of Coppola’s own mob advisors) for a universal story about the contradictions of pursuing fortune and glory in the world’s biggest economy. The end result is a film that resonates just as much with obsessive film snobs as TBS-watching dads, one of the most brilliant films of Coppola’s career and his most mainstream as well. —CZ

1. ‘The Conversation’ (1974)

Sandwiched between the release of the first two ‘Godfather’ films, ‘The Conversation’ is comparatively the forgotten movie of Coppola’s impeccable ’70s run, which is maybe appropriate for such a phenomenal movie about isolation. Influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Blowup’ but moving the medium from photography to sound, ‘The Conversation’ features a never-better Gene Hackman as a paranoid and reclusive surveillance expert who faces a moral dilemma when  a recording made on a job reveals a potential murder. Following him through a bleak San Francisco, ‘The Conversation’ features some of Coppola’s most immaculate filmmaking, tautly building tension with every scene, and some peerless sound work. Its story can be seen as a metaphor in many ways, from a reflection of the paranoia shaking a post-Watergate America to a sly look at the art of filmmaking itself. But the film is great primarily as a gorgeously and heartbreaking thriller and study of a man haunted in a world he can not trust, concluding on the single most disquieting moment Coppola ever conjured up on film. —WC