Coppola film tops critics’ list

APOCALYPSE NOW is the best film of the past three decades, critics said yesterday.

Francis Ford Coppola’s gritty Vietnam war movie topped a poll marking 30 years of the London Film Critics’ Circle Awards, where it won best film in 1980.

The critics did not think there has been a better film since and placed it ahead of Steven Spielberg’s harrowing Holocaust epic Schindler’s List and the critics’ 2007 foreign-language winner The Lives Of Others.

Starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen, Coppola’s work is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 19th Century colonial novella Heart Of Darkness.

The full winners’ list as voted for by London Film Critics’ Circle members is as follows:

* 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. LA 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)