At the London Film Critics’ Circle Awards, Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ was crowned Best Film of the Past Three Decades.
The film stars Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 19th Century colonial novella ‘Heart Of Darkness’. The film, by all accounts, was quite a bizarre affair, with tantrums by the likes of Brando, Sheen suffering a heart attack through excessive drinking, the almost total abandonment of any script and local set decorators being a tad over-zealous and actually digging up corpses to use in the battle scenes.
Be that as it may, it certainly is a great film. The top ten films of the past thirty years, according to the votes of the London Film Critics Circle, were:
1. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1980)
2. Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1994)
3. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2007)
4. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)
5. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
6. Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1990)
7. L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
8. Fargo (Joel Coen, 1996)
9. Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1989)
10. The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1983)
Good to see Unforgiven and Fargo in the list.