Popular reviews

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★½ 5

  If you’re going to squander millions of dollars, send your film company into ruins, and set yourself on the path to years making wine and for-hire gigs, you might as well do it on a stone-cold masterpiece. Like, wow.

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★½ 7

  Francis and co. are going SO HARD making one of the best looking things ever and I desperately wish anything beneath the surface worked for me at all

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 1

  "You know what's wrong with America don't you? It's the light! There are no more secrets, it's phony tinsel, it's phony bullshit man. Nothing's real!"

  A movie where the only logic seems to be cinematic! It truly feels intoxicated by cinema; drunk on the possibilities in composition, juxtaposition, superimposition, etc. And with that above quote it seems there might be some form of sociological imperative, opening as it does with the break-up of a working class woman and man living on the outskirts of Las Vegas. But its actually a relationship movie, one of the best ever made, about the little bumps that happen over a night yet feel like the entire world is crumbling. This is already implied through…

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★★ 20

  I saw The Godfather when it first opened. It was 1972; I was 13 ( just sneaking in under the Ontario PG-13 rating ). I was enthralled. I saw The Conversation two years later, and was spellbound. In 1979 Apocalypse Now impressed, but didn’t move me. Then, when I was 23, I took a seat in the Towne Cinema on Bloor Street in Toronto and fell in love with One from the Heart.

  I planned to take a date to see it a few days later … but it was gone. It had left town in less than a week. How could this be?

  I hadn’t revisited this love in close to 15 years, and back then it was on…

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★½ 4

  The first half plays like Contempt, a couple arguing about their misery, desperate for escape. But once Teri Garr dons that red dress, it turns into something else, not a neo-realist musical, but from neo-realist to musical. Its heart is the basic building blocks of cinema: a man and a woman fall out of then into love. It's Sunrise, True Heart Susie, Lonesome and more.

  Filmed entirely on Coppola's Zoetrope Studio (at such tremendous expense that bankrupted it and him, as usual), the camera glides from one reality to another, the world not broken by jagged edits or ruptures, but through lighting, shifting into and out of shadow, elementally melancholy blues and electric reds.

  And that dress! Teri Garr's terrific…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½ 3

  Is there a bigger piece of movie fantasy than someone picking Frederic Forrest over Raul Julia? Over conceptualized and deeply sincere, a mix that in some ways seems to be very embedded in the movie Coppola's is trying to achieve. It is a redreamed Sunrise (by way of Fellini's The White Sheik) for an artificial world that matches its love and distrust of movie fantasy. It makes the best of the contradictions at heart of Coppola's cinema his facility of expressing emotion through spectacle and how such emotion seems focused on alienation and disconnect. Every idea is spell out in maximum detail like how this over symbolic July 4th movie objects of desire are played by foreign actors whose un-Americanness…

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  Review by Toing ★★★

  The dude in this is literally the worst film character I've seen all year, and 1982 is really no excuse. Its parity conceit would work a lot better if he wasn't like, an all-time huge asshole in the romance genre. He's abusive, he cheats more than she does, the first thing he tells his other lust interest is "ya got a nice build to ya", and his "change of heart" is due to a magical realist vision of JEALOUSY! Also he's ugly. Anyway really neat film otherwise, really balls out formally for such a dramatic dead fish.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  "If I could sing to you, I'd sing to you."

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  Review by Alex Kittle ★★★½

  If Francis Ford Coppola had to go bankrupt on something, I feel like copious amounts of neon lights and the chance to chill with Tom Waits was a solid choice.

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½ 4

  I think I've reached the point where Coppola's non-pantheon works (this, The Conversation, Dracula, his three digital movies) hit me on a deeper level and are more ecstatic works of pure style than his All-Important entries into the Canon. Nominally a companion of Scorsese's own New Hollywood musical, this goes infinitely further in its total aesthetic upheaval. NEW YORK, NEW YORK is an old musical occurring in something near the real world (albeit also a critique of the highly stylized "reality" of NH drama), but this takes place in an alien world where the musical itself has always been a means of confronting hard issues through escapism, a small world where you run away from something for no more than…

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  Review by Muriel ★★★★★ 2

  straight up perfect, like watching a bunch of fireworks going off. seeing harry dean stanton and nastassja kinski together onscreen three years before paris, texas felt very important to me for some reason so there's that.

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  Review by Alice Stoehr ★★★★½ 1

  I'm tempted to review this movie with nothing but a gasp of "aaahh" as my mouth hangs agape and my eyes bulge. Or maybe I could just drop a bunch of adjectives—"invigorating! dazzling! overwhelming!"—that convey my awe but tell you nothing about the movie. Watching Coppola's post-Apocalypse so-called failure was that much of a knocked-upon-my-ass experience. I'm a sap for simple love stories, and this is such a simple one; a "break up, sleep around, reunite" story, and I can't imagine it any other way. The plot had to be this clean and slender because the style possesses such dizzying, Donen-esque brio—all crane shots and bold colors—while the emotions are like boulders laid upon the viewer's chest.

  All of this…