The Godfather Trilogy
Adapting Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel, Francis Ford Coppola drew up several themes lying dormant within its pages and augmented them in a uniquely cinematic fashion to create a masterful saga.
Tag Archives: Francis Ford Coppola
Vikings – Final Season
How can Vikings bring its epic saga to a close? It began in 937 as a bloody conquest and ends nearly thirty years later on the shores of a new world. A story of ambition, love, and rage, its great quest was for tranquility.
The Gordon Willis Frame
Gordon Willis was one of cinema’s greatest artists. Regardless of genre, his style and technique were so singular he should be regarded as a cinematrograph-auteur.
399. The Irishman
The gangster genre is dominated by men, but in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman the most important position is held by a woman who utters barely a dozen words.
396. L’Avventura
With this modernist masterpiece, Michelangelo Antonioni told a story that abandoned its initial plot. Booed at Cannes, it paved the way for a new cinematic form.
395. The Conversation
It is said a film is made three times; writing, filming and editing. In which case, editor Walter Murch deserves enormous credit for this masterpiece.
385. Unforgiven
Originally titled Whore’s Gold, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning western exposes the psychosis, bigotry and misogyny at the heart of the genre’s mythology.
371. The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe’s superb account about the early days of NASA’s space program needed filmmakers who shared a daring similar to the maverick pilots.
366. Come and See
Widely regarded as the greatest war picture ever made, Elem Klimov’s Come and See takes its title from The Book of Revelations to deliver a vision of hell.
360. Waltz with Bashir
Ari Folman’s animated documentary is different from many other films about trauma. But it is only in its final moments that it reveal its most telling truth.
356. Hidden
Michael Haneke asks audiences difficult questions yet never provides easy answers. When he calls his film Hidden, can we expect anything different?
Persona – After and Before
This short video-essay position Ingmar Bergman’s Persona in terms of what came after it and what went before. It shows how Bergman visualised his central theme of identity.
351. Heat
Ever since its release in 1995, Heat has been held as the greatest ever heist movie. But it has another, completely different film living and dying inside of it.
350. The Lives of Others
An exposé of life in East Germany under the Stasi, The Lives of Others still frustrated survivors of the totalitarian regime.
345. Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola’s off-beat romance deftly explores isolation, miscommunication and the superficiality of modern media.
330. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Werner Herzog’s hallucinatory telling of a Conquistador’s search for El Dorado etches a landscape of greed on the human face.
329. The Godfather Part II
Less a sequel and more a cloak that wraps itself around the original, it has a son haunted by the memory of his dead father.
327. The Godfather
Regarded as the greatest gangster picture of them all, the passing years continue to reveal new layers and meanings in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece.
311. Peeping Tom
Reviled upon its release and long out of circulation, the influence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is now to be found in the most unexpected places.
305. Blow Out
Rear Window, Vertigo, Blowup, Weekend, the Zapruder film and The Conversation are all to be seen and heard in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out.
303. Blowup
Originally titled A Girl, a Photographer and a Beautiful April Morning, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Palme d’Or winner is still as enigmatic fifty years on.
Vikings – Ivar the Boneless and His Rise to Power
This is a short video-essay examining the power shift in Vikings’ Season 5. Which of Ragnar’s sons will succeed him to the throne?
287. Reds
As the US embraced Reaganomics and Hollywood found the formula for the modern blockbuster, Warren Beatty embarked on a project examining the origins of American communism.
282. The Leopard
All countries have troubled histories they would rather forget. The Leopard is a masterpiece that admits to those troubles as well as the failure to fix them.
