Apocalypse Now Wins Movie Accolade

1:28am UK, Friday November 08, 2002

Francis Ford Coppola's brutal Vietnam classic Apocalypse Now has been named the greatest film of the past 25 years by movie experts.

The movie - based on Joseph Conrad's literary classic Heart of Darkness - was chosen by a panel of 50 British critics and film writers.

Greatest film: Apocalypse Now

Highest ranking British movie was Terence Davies's Distant Voices, Still Lives at number nine in the poll organised by the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine.

Runner-up

Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull was runner-up in the list while Ingmar Bergman's Fanny And Alexander came third.

Brit Director Ridley Scott's Blade Runner comes in at number seven.

Films dating from January 1978 to this year were eligible so the much-loved Star Wars fell just outside the time limit.

Apocalypse Now features famed scenes such as Martin Sheen's genuinely drunken rampage where he trashes a room.

Valkyries

Other notable sequences include Robert Duvall's famous declaration "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" before his gunships blast a village while blasting Ride of the Valkyries from speakers.

Nick James, editor of Sight & Sound, said: "As film history now spans over 100 years it's almost impossible to compile a list of top films.

"In this new poll we wanted to free people up from choosing the established classics like Citizen Kane and let them concentrate on recent cinema."

Top Ten:

1. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
2. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
3. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
4. GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
5. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
6. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
7. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
8. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994)
9. Distant Voices Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988)
10= Once upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1983)
10 = A One and a Two... (Edward Yang, 1999)