Francis ford coppola

Somehow the strange circumstances of the death of Gene Hackman, found dead in his New Mexico home with his wife Betsy and their dog, make the end of one of America’s finest actors all the more poignant. The full details will presumably become clear soon — but whatever happened, it is more important to remember Hackman’s legendary on-screen career than to waste time fixating on his final moments. He was an actor without sentiment, but with enormous amounts of fierce compassion — even when playing villains — and it is those qualities that should be celebrated. Hackman began his life in the Marine Corps before he became an actor, and many of his best performances have the tough, unbending quality that he developed in the military.

After a fairly barren summer movies-wise (I’m just waiting for the Alien: Romulus backlash to begin, and will be only too pleased to join in with it), there are more promising movies coming our way this fall. Yet the one that’s attracted more attention and interest than possibly anything else this year, maybe even this decade, is the grand return of Francis Ford Coppola with Megalopolis, a self-funded, wildly ambitious folie de grandeur that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to predictably mixed reactions and an overall consensus that, alas, the one-time visionary genius of theater is no longer a force to be reckoned with, however loopily wild his latest (and, one reluctantly assumes, last) movie is.

Although this year’s Cannes Film Festival hasn’t concluded yet (it runs until this Saturday), there is a general sense that the true talking-point pictures have been frontloaded into the opening week, both in competition and out of it. Without doubt, the one that has attracted the most attention is Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic Megalopolis, which premiered last Thursday to a mixture of outright scorn and bemused but respectful appreciation, all of which suggests that, although it still lacks a US distributor, it will keep making waves upon its release later this year — although the chances of Coppola regaining anything like his $120 million investment are slim, to say the least.

This Friday sees the Cannes premiere of a film that, by rights, really ought not to exist. As the likes of its stars Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Dustin Hoffman and Shia LaBeouf all assemble on the Croisette, it will be its now eighty-five-year-old director, screenwriter and producer, Francis Ford Coppola, who will be the most closely watched figure of the night, if not the entire festival. Megalopolis, the movie that they are all gathering to promote, has been Coppola’s great passion project all through his career. He first came up with the idea in 1977, began to develop it in 1983 and, finally, sold part of his wine empire a few years ago to raise the film’s $120 million budget.

Ask your average man on the street — or at least your average clued-up man with a decent knowledge of modern Hollywood — about the films of William Friedkin, who has died aged eighty-seven, and he will confidently sing the praises of Friedkin’s legendary pictures, The French Connection and The Exorcist. Then if he is pressed on the other eighteen films Friedkin directed, ranging from the excellent and underrated to the dismal, and a look of panic is likely to come over his face before he excuses himself and rushes into a nearby subway (or, if he is in New York, flees to an overground railway in homage to the legendary car chase scene in The French Connection). It is your choice whether you do a Popeye Doyle and head off in frantic pursuit, or leave him be.

Thirty years after it was first released in America, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is returning to theaters, appropriately enough for a Halloween re-release. (It also serves as a soft preview for Coppola’s newly announced passion project, Megalopolis, an epic drama starring Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza.) It is hard to overstate what a difference the past three decades have made in Dracula's popular reception. Although it was a significant commercial hit upon release, thanks in part to Annie Lennox’s enormously popular theme tune "Love Song For a Vampire," it was critically derided as poorly acted, overblown, excessively bloody without being frightening and a travesty of the original novel.