Every Francis Ford Coppola Movie, Ranked

Four long years after the release of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Coppola would return with the Robin Williams-starring Jack. The film, about a boy who has a rare condition that has him age four times faster than normal, was largely criticized for being overly long and sentimental. Diane Lane, Jennifer Lopez, and Bill Cosby also starred in the movie, which was Coppola's second Disney-produced project after the Michael Jackson-starring Disneyland theme park film Captain EO. It's a shame that Coppola didn't have a more significant output during the '90s, which ended up being such a great decade for independent and auteur-driven movies. 

"Blandness and lack of daring characterize nearly every minute of the very long two hours, which are marked by a high degree of professionalism at the service of little content." —Todd McCarthy, Variety

Coppola's last film prior to Megalopolis was the low-budget murder mystery Twixt, starring Val Kilmer as witch-hunting author Hall Baltimore, who visits a small town and gets wrapped up in a mystery of his own. What ensues is a pulpy, hallucinogenic journey through real life and dreams, where Hall encounters V (Elle Fanning) and evil Flamingo (a pre-Solo: A Star Wars Story Alden Ehrenreich). The film also features Bruce Dern and Ben Chaplin, and is narrated by Coppola regular Tom Waits.

Critics weren't kind, complaining that the film looked cheap and lacked thrills. Coppola's obsession with alternate versions of his films—a recurring theme throughout the later decades of his career, as you'll soon learn—continued in 2023 with the release of B'Twixt Now and Sunrise: The Authentic Cut, which reorders several scenes and eliminates the existing ending. 

"One can reflect on what the young Coppola, with his masterful camera work and vivid imagination, might have done with such an opportunity. Unfortunately, the present-day one produces only tepid and tired imagery that would not earn high marks in any film school." —Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter

Youth Without Youth arrived a decade after Coppola's previous movie, The Rainmaker, and was met with a critical and box office shrug. Tim Roth stars as a 1930s professor whose youth is restored after he is struck by lightning—another cinematic take on aging, like Coppola's earlier film, Jack. Unlike that film, Youth Without Youth was lauded for its lush visuals, but was largely criticized for being incoherent and thematically scattered, covering WWII espionage, melodrama, horror, and more. The film only managed to make $2.6 million around the world and would usher in a more audacious phase of Coppola's career. 

"Most certainly a personal work—so personal, in fact, that I can't imagine anyone but Coppola being able to sit through it." —Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

After Coppola's bold and personally expensive One From the Heart, the filmmaker moved on to a more conventional adaptation of S.E. Hinton's acclaimed 1967 coming-of-age novel set in the early 1960s in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Outsiders is probably best remembered for having a stacked cast of young soon-to-be superstars, including Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Diane Lane, Rob Lowe, and, of course, Ralph Macchio as Johnny and C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy. T

he melodramatic story of brotherhood and the tensions between the haves (the Socs) and have nots (the Greasers) has endured, but upon release was widely criticized for being too earnest. In 2005, Coppola released The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, an extended version of the film that adds over 20 minutes to the studio-imposed brevity of the 91-minute original. 

"Francis Coppola has made a well acted and crafted but highly conventional film out of S.E. Hinton's popular youth novel, The Outsiders." —Variety (uncredited)

Post Apocalypse Now, Francis Coppola (as he was credited here) returned to the subject of war, this time focusing on Sergeant Hazard (frequent Coppola collaborator James Caan), a Korean and Vietnam War vet who tries to teach young soldiers at home in the United States about his combat experience. Also starring are James Earl Jones and Dean Stockwell as fellow military colleagues and D.B. Sweeney as a young soldier that Hazard has a personal connection to that ends up serving several tours in Vietnam.

Critics largely praised the performances but felt like the film was too solemn and disjointed. It barely registered at the box office and remains a mostly unmentioned footnote in Coppola's oeuvre. 

"James Earl Jones, James Caan and D.B. Sweeney turn in superior performances in "Gardens of Stone," but it's all for naught. Francis Coppola sabotages their efforts with a handsome but fragmentary film that can't decide which story to tell." —Desson Howe, The Washington Post

Coppola has both worked within and bucked the Hollywood studio system. One From the Heart falls within the latter category. His studio/production company, American Zoetrope, ended up largely financing his ambitious musical romantic drama that is set in Las Vegas but all recreated on elaborate soundstages. In the film, a couple (Teri Garr and Frederick Forrest), break up after celebrating their fifth anniversary. They then spend the evening with other partners, played by Nastassja Kinski and Raul Julia. So much was made of the tumultuous production that by the time the film was finally released, critics were exhausted and audiences stayed away.

Did Coppola re-cut this one too? You bet. This year, a 4K restoration with previously lost footage was released as One from the Heart: Reprise. 

"A hybrid musical romantic fantasy, lavishing giddy heights of visual imagination and technical brilliance onto a wafer-thin story of true love turned sour, then sweet." —Variety (uncredited)

Upon initial release, this ornate adaptation couldn't have felt more out of place with what was playing at the cinema. Attempting a more faithful telling of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, Coppola mounted a movie that was both a tribute to the classic Gothic tale as well as an homage to early Hollywood filmmaking, with a beautifully stylized production that worked hard to capture everything, including elaborate special effects, in-camera. The film stars Gary Oldman as Dracula and Winona Ryder as his fateful object of desire, Mina Murray. A woefully miscast Keanu Reeves plays Mina's fiancé Jonathan Harker, Anthony Hopkins embodies Dracula's crotchety nemesis Van Helsing, and Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Sadie Frost, and Coppola regular Tom Waits (as vampire minion Renfield) fill out the cast.

Dracula was met with mixed reviews, with many critics complaining about its try-hard energy and taking shots at Reeves' self-admitted bad performance. Audiences were kinder (especially overseas), with the film making $215 million on a reported $40 million budget. It would be Coppola's last hit.

"There was so much potential, yet when it came down to it, Coppola made his Dracula too old to be menacing, gave Keanu Reeves a part and took out all the action. So all we're left with is an overly long bloated adaptation, instead of what might have been a gothic masterpiece." —Tom Hibbert, Empire

Before Francis Ford Coppola became a household name as a writer and director/auteur, he was coming up the ranks doing odd film jobs and directing low-budget Roger Corman flicks. After his UCLA film school thesis film You're a Big Boy Now was released to theatrical acclaim, he was offered the job to adapt popular Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow into a feature.

But musicals were on the way out in Hollywood, and despite starring the likes of Fred Astaire, Don Francks, and Tommy Steele, Finian's Rainbow was greeted by mixed reviews, with critics complaining about mismatched location shooting and cheap interior sets. Still, the film was a modest hit and was nominated for a couple of Academy Awards for score and sound and also collected a few Golden Globe nominations for Astaire, actress Petula Clark, and newcomer Barbara Hancock. 

"This pretentious whimsy defeated Francis Coppola—though he tries valiantly, he sinks the movie with stolid action sequences and gushy lyrical effects." —Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

Coppola's decades-in-the-making, personally financed $120 million sci-fi-ish epic about an architect trying to rebuild NYC New Rome after a disaster still doesn't have a conventional U.S. distributor as of this writing (though IMAX has signed on). But Megalopolis recently debuted at the Cannes Film Festival where it was met with mixed reviews from perplexed—though not entirely disinsterested—critics, who found the film's bold choices simultaneously admirable and laughable.

The film stars Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LeBeouf, and Giancarlo Esposito, and includes past Coppola players Laurence Fishburne (Apocalypse Now, Rumble Fish), James Remar (The Cotton Club), Jon Voight (The Rainmaker), D.B. Sweeney (Gardens of Stone), Talia Shire (The Godfather), and so many more. Considering it may very well be Coppola's last film, here's hoping Megalopolis plays on an IMAX screen near you sometime this year.

"It's windy and overstuffed, frequently baffling and way too talky, quoting Hamlet and The Tempest, Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch, ruminating on time, consciousness and power to a degree that becomes ponderous. But it's also often amusing, playful, visually dazzling and illuminated by a touching hope for humanity." —David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

Sixteen years after The Godfather Part II, Coppola returned to his most popular franchise with what turned out to be a cinematic punching bag: The Godfather Part III. The film was mostly maligned for casting misfires, including Coppola's decision to cast his daughter Sofia Coppola as Corleone daughter Mary (after Winona Ryder bowed out at the last minute due to exhaustion) and for Robert Duvall's decision not to return as consigliere/lawyer Tom Hagen (he was replaced by George Hamilton).

Throughout the years, the film's critical assessment has slightly improved, largely due to Coppola's recent re-edit, 2020's The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, which repositions the film as a story that exists just outside the two acclaimed originals. Critics mostly liked the main story of the mob getting into bed with the Vatican and the performances by Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, and new addition Andy Garcia. Given everything the film had going against it, it was financially successful and was nominated for several awards. 

"Lightning didn't strike three times; the movie is lumbering ... I don't think it's going to be a public humiliation, and it's too amorphous to damage our feelings about the first two." —Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

1983 would be the year Coppola would live in the literary world of S.E Hinton. In addition to The Outsiders, he and Hinton would adapt her 1975 novel Rumble Fish, which is similarly set in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is about trouble-seeking young thug Rusty James (Matt Dillon), who looks up to his now-reformed Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke). Brooding and brawls are basked in a beautiful high-contrast black and white photography, which really stood out in the neon-saturated early '80s. Other sweaty cast members include Diane Lane, Larry Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Chris Penn, and Nicolas Cage. Reviews were mixed, with critics either digging the expressionistic vibe or complaining that it was style over substance. 

"The stunning black-and-white cinematography in Francis Coppola's Rumble Fish functions rather like a cold compress, subduing a film that is otherwise all feverish extremes." —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

Francis Ford Coppola's first feature was the Roger Corman-produced Dementia 13, an early '60s, black-and-white, Psycho-inspired horror thriller about a conniving widow who is pursued by an axe murderer in and around the family's castle estate in Ireland. Phew. Clocking in at a brief 75 minutes, Dementia 13 received mixed-to-positive reviews, with many critics praising the overall filmmaking and inventive visuals that did a lot with a budget of less than $50,000 (which was money leftover from Corman's previous film, The Young Racers).

Over 50 years later (in 2017), Coppola re-edited the film, cutting six minutes and restoring his preferred original ending. That year also brought a remake of the original film by director Richard LeMay.

"There's no question that it carries all the hallmarks of a low-budget Corman effort. That being said, there is the feeling in Dementia 13 that there's a filmmaker behind the camera that really cares about the story at hand." —Samuel Williamson, Collider

One of Coppola's most personal projects, Tetro was the filmmaker's first solely written original screenplay since The Conversation and followed two estranged brothers (Alden Ehrenreich and Vincent Gallo) who reunite in Argentina as younger brother Bennie (Ehrenreich) attempts to decode and finish his depressed brother Tetro's unfinished play and submit it for awards consideration.

Two brothers reunited in a largely black-and-white movie with splashes of color was very reminiscent of Coppola's earlier film Rumble Fish, and critics were largely split, with some appreciating the melodramatic cinematic style, and others complaining that it was overly pretentious and boring. Tetro reportedly was made for $5 million (and looks incredible for that amount), but only made a little over half of that back. 

"Like Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola has gone from being the filmmaker of his time to becoming a make-it-up-as-you-go-along indie free-shooter." —Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Coppola's work in the '60s helped label him as an experimental American filmmaker, and his road picture The Rain People exemplifies this aesthetic alongside contemporaries Easy Rider and Wild Strawberries. Filmed across 18 states over five months, the drama stars Shirley Knight as a newly pregnant young woman who leaves her husband and takes to the road, where she encounters a former football player (James Caan) and a highway patrolman (Robert Duvall).

The film is notable for having a female lead and for starring Caan and Duvall, who would reunite a few years later in The Godfather. Many critics praised the raw performances from the actors, but detractors said it was nothing more than a student film writ large.

"[Coppola] has made a relentlessly good-looking, accurate-feeling movie without the patronizing paranoia toward the American heartland and its natives that is so much in fashion these days." —Roger Greenspun, The New York Times

The Godfather producer Robert Evans wanted to make a '30s Harlem jazz club drama at Paramount with director Robert Altman, but when Altman's Popeye flopped, the studio got cold feet. Evans then went to Coppola, who signed on as a fixer to make back some of the coin that he lost on One from the Heart. The troubled production would eventually star Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Gregory Hines, Bob Hoskins, and James Remar in a would-be retro tale about the titular club and the intersection of sex, gangsters, and jazz!

Advance stories about the production overpowered the actual film, which received generally positive reviews, with some critics digging the tommy-gun-and-tap-dancing vibe and others claiming that the film lacked focus. Even with some positive notices, Cotton Club would underperform at the box office, only making a little over half of its reported $58 million budget. Time for your director's cut drink: Coppola would restore and re-edit the film into the longer The Cotton Club: Encore, which would be released in 2019 (and isn't included separately in our ranking, though completists can note that it scored a 64). 

"This movie is so packed with character, incident and detail that it seems to whiz by like a ferocious number by a high powered jazz ensemble. In the process it skimps on connections and short-circuits many of its emotional relationships. But Coppola, called in to rescue the project and working under crazy financial and creative pressure, has come up with a vision of jazz-age fever in which violence, romance and race are choreographed to the music of the Harlem renaissance." —Jack Kroll, Newsweek

Outside of Richard Lester's filmography, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more "Sixties" film artifact than Coppola's adaptation of David Benedictus' 1963 novel You're a Big Boy Now, which the director shot as his MFA thesis project while attending UCLA's film school. Predating The Graduate, the film is a coming-of-age comedy about a repressed young man (Peter Kastner) who is beset by his overbearing parents, played by then real-life husband and wife Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. Kastner's Bernard wanders around mid-'60s New York City to the sound of Greenwich Village's very own The Lovin' Spoonful, with his affections split between icy actress Barbara (Elizabeth Hartman) and former classmate Amy (Karen Black).

Critics largely dug the swinging '60s vibe, though detractors claimed Coppola was copying the styles of Lester and French New Waver Jean-Luc Godard. But Big Boy showed that Coppola had the knack: The film received several Golden Globe nominations and Page would receive a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for her work. 

"Coppola has fun directing, and his film is filled with sight jokes, high-spirited performances and a lively soundtrack by the Lovin' Spoonful." —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

After the critical drubbing that his previous film, Jack, received, Coppola signed on for a director-for-hire gig at the home of The Godfather, Paramount Pictures. John Grisham adaptations were extremely popular in the 1990s and Grisham's novel about a young lawyer and a tiny law firm going after an avaricious insurance company and their Big Law minions was the next in line to get the movie treatment. Then up-and-comer Matt Damon played the young lawyer in a classic David and Goliath courtroom drama that also starred Danny DeVito, Claire Danes, Jon Voight, and Mickey Rourke.

The last conventional film in Coppola's career was met with solid reviews but was barely seen. On its opening weekend, it was bested by Anastasia and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Ouch. 

"The intelligence and subtlety of The Rainmaker took me by surprise. I don't know if this is because the novel is better than any of the prolific lawyer-turned-author's previous efforts, or if Francis Ford Coppola has performed a near-miracle in transforming the written pages into a screenplay." —James Berardinelli, ReelViews

After multiple directors (Jonathan Demme and Penny Marshall) and attached lead Debra Winger left the project, Coppola would sign on to direct bona fide movie star Kathleen Turner and Coppola's real-life nephew Nicolas Cage in a fantasy comedy-drama where present-day unhappily married Peggy Sue is transported back 25 years to her senior year of high school in 1960 with a chance to redo her life.

Somewhat thematically reminiscent of the prior year's Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married was also a modest hit in theaters before becoming a video store mainstay and playing countless times on cable. Critics were largely kind to the film, enjoying its vintage glow and Turner's luminous, poignant, and funny performance, but some bumped on Cage's nasal-voiced, exaggeratedly Method take on Peggy Sue's high-school boyfriend and husband. Turner would receive an Academy Award nomination for her work. 

"Peggy Sue is by no means a masterpiece of movie art, but it is an example of the sort of thoroughly enjoyable middle-brow Hollywood picture—clever, thoughtful, literate—that went missing about the time Peggy Sue got married." —Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail

A dream project since Coppola attended UCLA Film School, Tucker: The Man and His Dream would end up finally being produced in collaboration with the company of his former protégé, Lucasfilm, and is based on the true story of inventor Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) and his desire to build the best car for the masses following World War II.

Coppola, always a dreamer, likely related to the story of someone going against corporate and political forces. His passion is felt in this spirited telling, featuring an energetic turn by Bridges and nominated performances from Martin Landau as financier/confidant Abe Karatz and Dean Stockwell as Howard Hughes. Critics were largely along for the ride, but audiences failed to get on board, and the film (like Tucker's car company) was a financial failure ... though it did inspire a classic episode of The Simpsons.

"The result is a film consistent narratively, confident stylistically and abounce with the quaint quality that animated both the hero and his times, something we used to call pep." —Richard Schickel, Time

Written, directed, and produced by Coppola, his follow-up to The Godfather was a smaller-scale but intricately constructed thriller starring Gene Hackman as a wiretapper who is hired to surveil a young couple and discovers that they might soon be murdered. What unfolds is a brilliantly tense drama of who is watching and listening to whom—the first (but not last) audio-oriented answer to Antonioni's photo-centric Blow-Up.

The film was widely praised and would win the coveted Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and be nominated for several awards stateside. Its reputation was grander than its modest audience at the time, although that has grown substantially throughout the years. Hackman would notably play another surveillance operator 24 years later in Tony Scott's 1998 thriller Enemy of the State.  

"Like Antonioni, Coppola was wrestling with the properties of his chosen medium and showing how art can conceal and deceive as much as it can tell us something plain and true." —Scott Tobias, The Dissolve

Frequently referred to as the best sequel ever made, The Godfather Part II wasn't quite unanimously acclaimed upon initial release, but it was close. The sequel picks up a few years after the original, with Vito's son Michael, now the titular Godfather of the Corleone family, dealing with the pressures of balancing organized crime with the wants and needs of his family. New to the series is a parallel narrative from the past, showing how his father Vito (Robert DeNiro) immigrated to the United States, started a family, and entered a life of crime.

The rare critical dissenters had trouble following the dense narrative, but ignore them: The film would win six Oscars (including Best Director for Coppola) and become the first sequel to win a Best Picture Academy Award. 

"The Godfather Part II is the most ambitious American movie in terms of size and scope in recent memory. It goes much deeper than The Godfather in analyzing the twisted mentalities of these men who pervert the capitalist system for their own gain. The film is richer in texture and gives more evidence of social awareness." —Kathleen Carroll, New York Daily News

With the making of Apocalypse Now, Coppola took himself and the cinema art form to the brink of madness, with mesmerizing results. Loosely based on Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, the film was adapted by writer/filmmaker John Milius and was ostensibly about a Special Operations Captain's (Martin Sheen) secret mission down a river to assassinate the corrupt and reportedly insane Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). After a tumultuous 238-day shoot, Apocalypse Now was eventually released to raves, with critics praising the film's combination of setpieces and personal turmoil. It would win Coppola's second Palme d'Or of the 1970s and would eventually produce one of the best making-of documentaries ever, the late Eleanor Coppola's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991).

Francis Ford Coppola has released two additional versions of his film: The 2001 extended Apocalypse Now Redux* includes 50 additional minutes, and the 2019 4K restoration Apocalypse Now Final Cut trimmed about 20 minutes from Redux and was released in IMAX theaters. More like, Apocalypse Forever!

* Redux and Final Cut are the other two of Coppola's many re-cuts to receive enough reviews to get a Metascore—in this case, each received a 92—though it would be a bit too redundant to rank those films separately here.

"Movies have always been—at their most extravagantly appealing, sensually exciting and rationally disturbing—pieces of art with the power to bypass our defences. A few times in the history of movies, one caught glimpses of a power that could turn the screen experience into a hallucinatory celebration of irrationality, of pure feeling, and even, perhaps, of insanity. Apocalypse Now goes further in that direction more successfully than any movie ever has." —Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail

The Godfather is one of only 14 movies on Metacritic to have a perfect 100 Metascore, and even after 50 years, it's hard to disagree. The Sicilian-American gangster drama was a cinematic sensation in the early '70s and remains one of the best American films ever made. The epic story of the Corleone organized crime family and its titular patriarch, Vito (Marlon Brando), was adapted from Mario Puzo's best-selling novel and also famously stars Al Pacino, James Caan, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Talia Shire, and many more.

The film launched a franchise, has been endlessly studied, quoted, imitated, and parodied, and even had an entire 2022 limited series, The Offer, made about the making of the movie. If you haven't seen The Godfather, what are you waiting for—an offer you can't refuse? 

"One of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment." —Vincent Canby, The New York Times