Although writer-director Francis Ford Coppola weakened his 1979 Vietnam War epic by adding 50 minutes of new scenes (when they’re not redundant, they’re too politically strident), this is still one of the cinema’s true masterpieces. Perhaps the definitive movie about Vietnam, Apocalypse Now – in which Martin Sheen plays a United States assassin who travels to Cambodia to terminate a renegade colonel (Marlon Brando) – the film is also something even greater: a harrowing, visionary consideration of humankind’s depravity, as well as the lengths we’ll go to deny it.
