The Best (and Worst) Francis Ford Coppola Movies, Ranked

This is the earliest Coppola movie included on this list—he’s credited as a co-director with Jack Hill on The Bellboy and the Playgirls, released a few months earlier, but it’s footage from a West German film and there’s really no need to include more than one no-budget sexploitation film on this list. If you’re not familiar with the “nudie cutie” genre, this is a shabby but emblematic introduction: a desert miner (Don Kenney) and a right-wing city dandy (Karl Schanzer) meet at a Las Vegas burlesque show, regaling each other with scandalous tales of peeping on naked ladies. It ranks dead last not because it’s mostly softcore nudity, but because it so barely qualifies as a real movie, and it’s really hard to tell what’s going on.

Stream It Here

What’s more baffling about this fantasy musical–wherein Irish immigrants and a mischievous leprechaun fight a foul, bigoted senator and there is a lot of blackface—is that it was a critical and commercial success, earning back three times its budget and earning multiple Oscars and Golden Globe nominations. It’s dire, despite Coppola’s efforts to weave magic and realism together with a small budget and a game Fred Astaire (in his final major movie musical role). The film is far too long, doesn’t engage for any meaningful amount of time, and has an extended subplot where a racist white man is turned Black. Not worth anyone’s time.

Stream It Here

Buy DVD Here

It’s hard to tell if Jack is so bad because it’s such a misguided idea from the word go, or because every creative decision made an ill-advised idea worse. Robin Williams is Jack, a 10-year-old who ages four times the speed of a regular boy, so he’s in his forties when he joins the fifth grade (where JLo is his teacher). Movies about kids in a grown-up’s body have to walk a delicate line to not be insanely creepy, but Jack is happy to completely ignore all carefulness and veer the cozy family comedy into uncomfortable territory whenever someone mistakes Jack for an actual adult. Apart from the juvenile humor and insufferable sentimentality, the lead actor’s overactive, babbling schtick is completely wrong for the part–no 10-year-old has ever behaved like celebrated comedian Robin Williams. This car crash is admittedly more interesting than the previous two entries, saving it from being ranked dead last.

Stream It Here

Buy DVD Here

Eight years after his Vietnam epic changed the face of war cinema, Coppola showed us a more mundane, grounded, and altogether less interesting perspective on the war, while still trying to undermine the rhetoric of American jingoism. It’s 1968, and James Caan is Sergeant Clell Hazard (seriously, that’s his name), a Korean and Vietnam veteran whose current post in the “Old Guard” has him performing ceremonial duties at the funerals of a lot of young soldiers. The film’s skepticism towards American foreign policy is far too moderate and imprecise, but Caan, Anjelica Huston, James Earl Jones, and D.B. Sweeney keep things engaging enough in a “TV movie of the week” type way. It’s wild how much livelier Coppola’s films were when Zoetrope wasn’t in such jeopardy–it’s almost like creative freedom comes with a disproportionately increased financial precarity! But playing it safe didn’t do Coppola any favors–the film flopped, recouping only a third of its budget.

Stream It Here

Buy Blu-ray Here

Back in the day you could submit a broad, lewd comedy that skewered middle-class moralizing for your film school thesis project and get it shown at the Cannes Film Festival–on reflection, maybe it was too easy for white men to make movies in the 1960s. Bernard “Big Boy” Chanticleer (Peter Kastner) is a nebbish, klutzy romantic with overbearing parents (including Rip Torn, who would be playing dads for nearly forty more years) who chases and is rebuffed by several appealing young ladies–he just can’t figure out what he wants! Coppola’s first studio effort is as uneven and annoying as all of his pre-Godfather work, but there’s a sense of rambunctious chaos that at least makes you feel in on the joke.

Buy Blu-ray Here

After all the headaches caused by prior American Zoetrope films, it’s nice that Coppola enjoyed such a relaxed production with Twixt. Shot around Coppola’s Napa County estate, this is a hokey but not charmless ghost story about a washed-up horror writer (Val Kilmer) whose interest in a historic small town crime grows when he meets a young murdered girl (Elle Fanning) who still lingers in the Edgar Allan Poe-vibed forests. Oh, and Edgar Allan Poe is also in this film. It’s an uneven mix of sincere strangeness and playful rug-pulling, and it shares a good deal of visual jankiness with its much bigger cousin Megalopolis, but the tenderness with which Coppola looks at grief in his post-’90s work is still intact, and Kilmer compels with a blend of pathetic huckster and melancholic detective.

Stream It Here

Buy Blu-ray Here

When the late B-movie giant Roger Corman had no time to work up a cheap psychothriller with the leftover budget from an Ireland-shot sports drama, he tapped his sound technician Francis Ford Coppola to helm a quick gothic Psycho clone. Dementia 13 is no masterpiece, but it certainly is effective–theatrical performances and macabre atmosphere go a long way to elevate the film’s rushed production and low ambitions–if only slightly. This is a film with multiple bodies in lakes, an axe murderer stalking a castle estate, and a 76 minute runtime–a satisfactory combination.

Stream It Here

Buy Blu-ray Here

This is not the worst film from Francis Ford Coppola’s ’80s—it was a creatively difficult decade for the director, but he didn’t stop being talented. Still, every Reagan-era film of his still feels compromised. They’re ambitious, but probably need a finer touch or more rigorous approach to make them really sing. It’s a shame because Tucker: The Man and His Dream, which tells the story of Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) and his thwarted car-manufacturing revolution, feels analogous with how Coppola learned firsthand of how threatening creative autonomy is to commercial industries. Based on a true story, Tucker invents a car for the everyday American that’s so ahead of its time that the biggest automobile industries conspire with the US government to put him out of business and into jail. It’s a shame that the deepest themes and Bridges’s energetic performance feel abandoned in this ruthlessly conventional biopic.

Stream It Here

Buy Blu-ray Here

Coppola wasn’t originally attached to direct this Jazz-age gangster pic, but producer Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture memoirist) handed over directing duties after hiring a cash-strapped Coppola to put together a script. Richard Gere, Gregory Hines, Diane Lane, and many other talents filled the cast of this tap-dancing, trumpet-tooting tribute to the notorious New York nightclub, but the tumultuous production (there’s a few of those on this list) and bizarre events connected to the film end up being more interesting than the unfocused final product. There’s no faulting the music, and the gangster feuding definitely entertains, but Coppola has made much sharper musicals and more iconic mob pictures.

Stream It Here

Buy Blu-ray Here

There’s definitely more of Coppola’s spirit in films like Tucker or The Cotton Club, but this John Grisham adaptation delivers too many of the robust, familiar thrills of legal dramas to rank it any lower. Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) is the ultimate underdog going up against a prestigious law firm led by Leo Drummond (Jon Voight), fighting for a young leukemia patient who was screwed over by his insurance provider. Like a lot of Grisham adaptations, it’s a hair overlong with too many characters, but Coppola streamlines everything well enough into a pure drama delivery machine.

Stream It Here

Buy Blu-ray Here

One of those long-gestating passion projects that you can’t tell if every successive delay chipped away at the filmmaker’s original vision or added more weird stuff to it–there is no movie like Megalopolis hitting IMAX screens this decade, let alone this year. Combining a career’s worth of storytelling fixations–“ahead of their time” geniuses, operatic power struggles, and an obsession with technology doing stuff no-one in their right mind would use it for–Coppola realizes a career-spanning dream with all the winning sincerity and off-putting jankiness it deserves. Celebrity architect Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is on a superpowered crusade to repair a degrading New Rome, and the obstacles thrown in his way propel him towards a maximalist mental breakdown that only Driver is capable of pulling off. For all of Megalopolis’s nonsensical, uncanny, and baffling choices, Driver being so locked into Coppola’s vision is what makes enough of this film work.

Buy Tickets Here

A year before this release, Back to the Future took a similar premise–someone is thrown back in time from the mid-80s to join the baby boomer generation when they were at high school–and made a much more exciting and commercial film. In Peggy Sue Got Married, it’s the middle-aged boomer who travels back to their own high school experience, and this key difference makes Coppola’s film the more mature, reflective ’80s comedy. Kathleen Turner delights as Peggy Sue, tapping into her inner teen with a restless enthusiasm that easily shifts into melancholia as she confronts how disappointing she finds her future/past life. Also of note, Coppola let his nephew Nicolas Cage rehearse for Moonstruck by being super weird and over-the-top in a different mid-’80s rom-com.

Stream It Here

Buy DVD Here

Ten years after The Rainmaker, Coppola launched the next phase in his storied career–self-funding weird dramas that play with history, philosophy, and melodrama that primarily appeal to himself. Thankfully, it doesn’t mean they’re inaccessible to us. This low-budget adaptation of an obscure Romanian novella about a suicidal academic (Tim Roth) who’s struck by lightning and wakes up several decades younger finds tragedy, noir, and romance within an aggressively digital visual palette. There’s just so much life inside this strange, ambitious drama–a crucial precursor to the big, clunky swings of Megalopolis.

Stream It Here

Buy DVD Here

Coppola’s career as we know it exploded with The Godfather in 1972, but he had already made five very different features beforehand. This is the only one of any real merit–a bleak, tragic road movie about pregnant housewife Natalie (Shirley Knight) who feels trapped at home and hightails it westward looking for some ungraspable freedom, with surreal, subjective flashbacks interrupting her fugitive-like escape. James Caan and Robert Duvall give compelling but overcooked performances as equally lost men that Natalie picks up along the way, as she gets a punishing look at the neglect littering the roads of America.

Stream It Here

Buy Blu-ray Here

This is arguably a more defining film in Coppola’s career than any of the genre-defining classics. Coppola’s follow-up to his historic Apocalypse Now put his own money on the line–and the director would feel the repercussions for most of his subsequent career. It’s a shame–for all the flops in Coppola’s career, this is one of the least deserving. It’s a throwback to classic Hollywood musicals set in a neon-lit Las Vegas, following the diverging paths of a couple on the verge of irrevocable separation. Despite some dodgy character plotting and uneven balance of cynicism and earnestness, One from the Heart is often as dazzling as it is daring. Not the type of film you’d expect to derail an auteur’s career–at least, they’re not supposed to go this hard.

Stream It Here

Buy 4K UHD/Blu-ray Here

This was the first of two teen melodramas adapting S.E. Hinton’s work that Coppola released in 1983–The Outsiders was the most commercially successful if not the most artistically compelling. Still, the easy sentiment of The Outsiders is elevated with bleeding golden hues, Coppola’s enduring, attentive love for melodrama, and a cast of young, sensitive adolescent performances (this film is also chock full of future A-listers). The notes of nuance and pathos peppered throughout help to balance the broad emotional strokes of this Oklahoma turf war.

Stream It Here

Buy 4K UHD/Blu-ray Here

We’ve finally made it to one of those Godfather movies everybody keeps talking about! This threequel is nobody’s favorite installment, but it’s easier to love when you realize just how cash-strapped Coppola was when he agreed to make it. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is back in the driver’s seat, feeling guilty as sin and facing off against the Catholic church. The most enduring criticism of this film is the performance Sofia Coppola gives as Michael’s daughter (honestly, it’s fine) but the film is greatly improved by watching Coppola’s remastered cut of the film, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Most of Coppola’s major (and some minor) films have been recut and rereleased of late–how else can are you gonna fund your $120 million epic?

Stream It Here

Buy Blu-ray Here

This is the best film Coppola has made in the past thirty years, an unassuming and playful work about a changed fraternal rift that gets thornier and stranger as the film goes on. By emulating classic European melodrama, Coppola improves his digital filmmaking instincts and spins the bitter feud of two estranged brothers (played by Vincent Gallo and a baby Alden Ehrenreich) into a rich and moving tale of rejection and acceptance in a monochrome Argentina. Forgive the story’s more literary pretensions–this is an intimate, soulful work from someone who always had a taste for the theatrical.

Stream It Here

Buy DVD Here

You’re probably wondering why one of the most frequently cited “best films of all time” didn’t crack the top five slots–but it’s not fair to write a predictable ranking of a filmmaker this erratic and unpredictable. Yes, this sequel/prequel is so epic that it often feels like the apex of gangster movies, sequels, and films made in the ’70s, but there’s no denying that Coppola makes stranger and more evocative choices in much “lesser” later work. Cutting between the fatalistic extension of Michael’s empire and his immigrant father Vito (Robert De Niro) mapping out his own in the early 20th century, Coppola reflects that the generational trajectory of The Godfather series is perhaps more cursed than prosperous–we love when a guy realizes he may have ruined his life, don’t we?

Stream It Here

Buy 4K UHD/Blu-ray Here

A black-and-white mood piece about one of the most severe cases of youngest child syndrome in American cinema, Coppola followed up The Outsiders with another Matt Dillon-starring S.E. Hinton adaptation that, simply put, stuns. Where The Outsiders was heartrending and picturesque, Rumble Fish is restless and piercing, laying bare the insecurities and inadequacies of street thug Rusty James (Dillon), who puffs out his chest whenever he’s not in the company of his intimidating brother (Mickey Rourke). It’s the highlight of Coppola’s career-long obsession with the push-and-pull of brotherly love–Rumble Fish gives Dillon the Brando/Dean-tier spotlight he’s always deserved.

Stream It Here

Buy Blu-ray Here