How do you conjure a spectacle as a mere man? Real spectacle, the kind that rivals the infinite colorful vistas of the Northern Lights or…
Twixt (2011) closes the gap between Francis Ford Coppola’s Corman-produced horror debut, Dementia 13 (1963), and his 21st-century excursions into low-budget experimentation, Youth Without Youth…
Before anything else, before any talk of its “uneven narrative” (per the otherwise complimentary Rotten Tomatoes critic’s consensus), it’s worth considering the contours of Francis…
Just as Megalopolis could be seen as a parable about Coppola’s own empire — Zoetrope, circa One from the Heart — Youth Without Youth is…
The Rainmaker may have been a gun-for-hire assignment Francis Ford Coppola did for the paycheck at the height of John Grisham movie mania and during…
Not much is said about the blemishes of an auteur’s career, especially if they prove to be wholly uncharacteristic of its maker’s blueprint. Idiosyncratic in…
Cinema’s obsessions with images are the result of its propensity for their proliferation: although literature tempts the wayward imagination, cinema is what drives it truly…
Sandwiched between the populist comedy of Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and the lurid fantasia machinery of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1990), Coppola returned…
At age six, Francis Ford Coppola waited for a Tucker Torpedo to arrive in his driveway. His grandfather, Agostino, was among Hollywood’s first generation of…
If every Coppola movie is also a documentary of its making, Gardens of Stone is the most haunted. One year before its release, Francis’s oldest…
As successful as Coppola was in the 1970s, with four consecutive films garnering massive critical and/or box office success, the 1980s proved to be a…
In a way, it’s odd that Coppola decided that The Cotton Club required a concluding fantasy sequence. Yes, as a movie musical, The Cotton Club…
In 1982, Francis Ford Coppola briefly made dramatizing the works of young adult author S.E. Hinton his entire personality. Licking his wounds in the aftermath…
The Outsiders is one of the few — possibly the only — entries in Francis Ford Coppola’s oeuvre that is widely considered a cult classic…
“You know what’s wrong with America, don’t you? It’s the light,” Hank rants to his buddy. “It’s all tinsel, it’s all phony bullshit, man. Nothing’s…
Once upon a time, the great François Truffaut said, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” The details of when he said this, and…
Who’s a Fredo? The Godfather Part II Against the New Right 1. In what amounts to the coda of The Godfather Part II, the final…
While his first directorial credit for a commercial project was released a decade after the Movie Brats first took hold of Hollywood in the late…
Call him what you want: a legend, heir to true Hollywood classicism, an egocentric industry black sheep, a man of his own mark who frequently…
“Harun [Farocki] told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, [Night and Fog] was the movie that showed them what had happened…
In 1954, a 19-year-old girl named Sylvette David sauntered past Pablo Picasso’s window. The aging artist was instantly beguiled. A few weeks later, he revealed…