Apocalypse Now treads into the dark heart of humanity: horrifying but sadly not unfamiliar territory. Captain Willard is sent upriver during the Vietnam War to exterminate the rogue Colonel Kurtz, “with extreme prejudice.” Along the way he and his comrades must confront their own demons, and decide whether Kurtz is mad and what “goodness” means in a world full of insanity. As an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola films Willard’s quest up river as a kind of anti-pilgrimage, ending in a place where the striking images of Kurtz’s idolatry challenge any effort to see any humane purpose amid the struggles of war and empire. – Anders Bergstrom