Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola was a pretty intense dude during the ’70s. He damn near lost his mind while shooting Apocalypse Now in the jungles of Southeast Asia, a quagmire duly chronicled in the documentary Hearts of Darkness. While shooting The Godfather Part II on location in Trieste, Coppola told Italian journalists, “To some extent, I have become Michael.” He’s a larger-than-life character, and it’s only fitting that he’ll now be dramatized himself.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is one of the defining works of cinema of the 1970s. And in the very near future, you could play it as a video game.

Given how much space physical media takes up, it’s hard for movie buffs to say no to the great promise of “cloud storage,” and the idea that we could summon anything we want to watch with just a couple of clicks. But so far, reality hasn’t matched the hype. Streaming services have been focused on exclusives and original programming, to the extent that the only way to have access to everything available is to spend hundreds of dollars a month on subscription fees. Meanwhile, older films keep disappearing from the digital archives; and even items that cinephiles “own” sometimes become inaccessible whenever software updates or a site shutters.

HBO Now is good for many things: for catching up on those shows you’ve been missing, for watching films exclusively airing on the premium network (including pretty much all the Police Academy movies, if that’s your thing, sure), for using your parents’ password to take advantage of their disposable income… But there’s something else the streaming service has that you won’t find anywhere else: a seven-hour cut of the first two Godfather films, edited in chronological order. If you have the day off, now might be a good time to indulge in such a thing.

Val Kilmer has taken to his personal Facebook page to post a Top Gun 2 status update with ramifications on a scale that we can only describe as tectonic.

There is some dark stuff intertwined with the history of Jeepers Creepers — specifically with its director, Victor Salva. And yet, somehow, some way, Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope is producing Jeepers Creepers 3, 12 years after the release of the underwhelming Jeepers Creepers 2. This is baffling for a few reasons.

In the mid ‘90s, Robin Williams was starting to take some risks. He had just filmed two crowd-pleasers in a row – ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ and ‘Jumanji’ – and it was apparent that he was looking for something, let’s say, meatier. And Williams would later find those roles with ‘The Birdcage’ and ‘Good Will Hunting’ (a movie that would win him an Academy Award). But, before that, Williams eyed a script that had been the subject of a bidding war between every major studio in town. After Disney won the rights, Williams convinced director Francis Ford Coppola to direct. On the surface, it appeared to be a prestige project. But that project turned out to be ‘Jack’ – a movie about a young boy who, by the age of 10, appears to be 40 -- a now almost legendary critical failure that was written by James DeMonaco … the man who also wrote and directed a movie nothing like 'Jack,' ‘The Purge’ and its upcoming sequel.