Apocalypse Now: Critic Reviews

As technically complex and masterful as any war film I can remember.

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.

There are worse ways to make movies, but there are a lot of better ones too.

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.'

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 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.

It may just be the most ferocious of all American films.

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.

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.

Apocalypse Now is as good as ever.

His film is timeless because although the setting may change, the wars and the plight of soldiers will remain the same.

...it's wonderful to see this hallucinatory folly-cum-near masterpiece again on the big screen.

I remember leaving the theater feeling shocked, bewildered, confused and, though I was amazed and thrilled by the action, the ending somehow left me unsettled.

One of cinema's finest hours...Brando, in his limited screen time, makes an everlasting impression.

Coppola's magnum opus remains one of the singular reasons filmmaking was invented.

It is also the perfect device for so many universal stories, mythic and true. The journey is everyman's road to self-discovery.

...one of the most amazing pieces of celluloid ever produced, capturing not only the ugliness and ridiculousness of Vietnam, but exposing the dark heart of man as well.

It is also occasionally flaccid, incomprehensible and obtuse. Yet, it manages to overcome these flaws to stand as a fascinating study of the nature of evil in man.

Apocalypse Now has a philosophical underpinning that sets it apart from other recent cinematic evaluations of the American involvement in Vietnam.

...Coppola's sprawling, harrowing war story is not to be missed.

Coppola has made a major mistake by this re-edit.

No film has depicted the fiasco in Southeast Asia in more mythic form than Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

I remember leaving the theater feeling shocked, bewildered, confused and, though I was amazed and thrilled by the action, the ending somehow left me unsettled.