Apocalypse Now: Critic Reviews

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

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 film that needs to be seen on the big screen.

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 film has one of the most haunting endings in cinema, a poetic evocation of what Kurtz has discovered, and what we hope not to discover for ourselves.

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.

With a famously horrific and documentary inspiring shoot it's almost unfathomable how Francis Ford Coppolla managed to harness the chaotic energy into one of the most potent examinations of war and masculinity to ever grace celluloid.

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.

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.

It is mystical, daring, poetic, thrilling, appalling and never less than utterly mesmerising.

Coppola delivered a harrowing masterwork that bursts with malarial, mystical images...

A gilt-edged, no-messing, accept-no-substitutes masterpiece.

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.