Apocalypse Now resembles no other film ever made.

Rating: 10/10 (7 June 2010)

In 2009, the London Film Critics' Circle voted Apocalypse Now the best film of the last 30 years. During the Vietnam War, a US captain (Martin Sheen) is sent up the Mekong river with a small crew to terminate 'with extreme prejudice' the command of a colonel (Marlon Brando) who, suffering delusions of grandeur, is ruling his own 'kingdom' in the jungle.
Apocalypse Now is a fever dream of a war film, a hallucinogenic experience that aims to replicate the dislocation and hellishness of the Vietnam conflict. It's easily disparaged as an expensive folly that got out of control, both in the logistical and budgetary sense. But it remains a series of dazzling, sometimes macabre set-pieces, held together by a river journey into the unknown. Based loosely on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart Of Darkness, it shares that book's sense of horror and insanity. Even the film's harshest critics would concede that it is unforgettable.