Francis Ford Coppola Film Forum Retrospective Brings “The Godfather,” “Apocalypse Now” and 25 Classics to NYC

COPPOLA, a three-week, 25-film retrospective of the legendary Oscar-winning American director Francis Ford Coppola’s work, will run at Film Forum from Friday, August 21, through Thursday, September 10.

 

Francis Ford Coppola Takes Over Film Forum: 25 Films, Three Weeks and Multiple Cuts of “Apocalypse Now”

Film Forum’s sweeping Francis Ford Coppola retrospective runs Aug. 21 through Sept. 10 in New York City, bringing “The Godfather” trilogy, “The Conversation,” “Rumble Fish,” “Megalopolis,” rare director’s cuts, 35mm screenings and new Zoetrope restorations back to the big screen.

For three weeks, Film Forum is handing its screens over to Francis Ford Coppola—and the resulting program is less a conventional retrospective than a guided tour through one of the most unruly, ambitious and frequently self-reinventing careers in American cinema.

Running from Friday, Aug. 21, through Thursday, Sept. 10, “Coppola” gathers 25 films spanning more than six decades: the operatic criminal mythology of “The Godfather” trilogy, the surveillance-state unease of “The Conversation,” the feverish war spectacle of “Apocalypse Now,” the expressionist youth cinema of “Rumble Fish,” and the utopian provocation of “Megalopolis.” The series also includes new Zoetrope restorations, director’s cuts, 35mm prints and alternate versions of films Coppola has continued revisiting long after their original releases.

For moviegoers who regard the words “final cut,” “complete novel” and “roadshow version” as invitations rather than warnings, the centerpiece may be the opportunity to compare two incarnations of “Apocalypse Now.”

The 182-minute “Apocalypse Now: Final Cut” will screen alongside the harder-to-see 149-minute 1979 Roadshow Version, which recreates the original theatrical presentation. Ticket holders for the Roadshow screenings will receive a facsimile of the original 12-page souvenir booklet—an artifact designed for the kind of viewer who knows that Coppola’s Vietnam epic has never really stopped being edited, reconsidered, or argued over.

The retrospective also returns “The Conversation” to theaters in both 35mm and a 4K restoration. Coppola’s 1974 paranoid thriller stars Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert whose professional detachment begins to collapse after he becomes convinced that a recording may implicate him in an impending murder. Winner of the Palme d’Or and nominated for three Academy Awards, the film remains one of the director’s most controlled works—a tight, chilly counterpoint to the grand scale of the two “Godfather” films surrounding it in Coppola’s extraordinary run during the 1970s.

Naturally, the Corleones are heavily represented.

“The Godfather” returns in a 4K restoration, followed by “The Godfather Part II,” the rare sequel that expanded its predecessor’s mythology while winning six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. The third chapter appears in Coppola’s recut version, “Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone,” which reorganizes the director’s once-divisive conclusion around Michael Corleone’s reckoning with power, family and consequence.

But the pleasure of a retrospective this broad lies in moving beyond the canonical monuments.

There is “One From the Heart: Reprise,” Coppola’s visually extravagant romantic musical, now presented in a 4K restoration. There is “The Cotton Club: Encore,” his revised version of the Harlem-set period drama starring Richard Gere, Gregory Hines, Diane Lane, Lonette McKee and Laurence Fishburne. There is “Peggy Sue Got Married,” projected in 35mm, with Kathleen Turner revisiting the compromises and possibilities of her younger life.

The program also makes a persuasive case for Coppola as a filmmaker of adolescence. His two S.E. Hinton adaptations could hardly be more different: “The Outsiders: The Complete Novel” embraces youthful loyalty, class conflict and a future movie-star ensemble, while “Rumble Fish” transforms Hinton’s material into a dreamlike black-and-white study of alienation, time and doomed cool. The latter stars Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke, with Diane Lane, Nicolas Cage and Dennis Hopper orbiting its stylized world.

Other selections stretch back to Coppola’s Roger Corman-produced directorial debut, “Dementia 13: Director’s Cut,” and include the road drama “The Rain People,” starring Shirley Knight, James Caan and Robert Duvall; “Finian’s Rainbow,” featuring Fred Astaire in his final musical role; “Tucker: The Man and His Dream”; “The Rainmaker”; “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”; “Gardens of Stone”; “Tetro”; “Youth Without Youth”; and “B’Twixt Now and Sunrise.”

The series even makes room for “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” the documentary chronicling the famously troubled production of “Apocalypse Now.” Screening a film alongside the documentary about its near-disastrous creation is an especially Film Forum kind of gesture: the masterpiece and the evidence of what it cost to make it, placed within walking distance of each other.

At the far end of the chronology sits “Megalopolis,” Coppola’s decades-in-the-making epic starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel and Aubrey Plaza. Whatever one thinks of the film, it belongs in this company. Coppola’s career has repeatedly been shaped by the belief that cinema should risk embarrassment, financial ruin and critical hostility in pursuit of something enormous.

That impulse connects “Megalopolis” to the rest of the retrospective more convincingly than a simple career timeline could. Coppola has made gangster films, musicals, literary adaptations, youth dramas, horror films, conspiracy thrillers and war epics. He has also returned to his own work again and again—restoring it, expanding it, shortening it and reframing it.

Film Forum’s “Coppola” offers New York moviegoers the chance to do the same: look again.

“Coppola” runs Aug. 21 through Sept. 10 at Film Forum in New York City. The public screening schedule is subject to change.