In his book The Films of My Life, the French director Francois Truffaut makes a curious statement. He used to believe, he says, that a successful film had to simultaneously express “an idea of the world and an idea of cinema.” But now, he writes: “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.” It may seem strange to begin a review of Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now those words, but consider them for a moment and they apply perfectly to this sprawling film. — Roger Ebert