Francis Ford Coppola is one of the first and most successful graduates of the California film schools. Like many of his peers, he has been fascinated with movies since childhood and has drawn on the whole of American film culture as inspiration for his w...

Francis Ford Coppola rests in an elite company of American film directors who often write their own screenplays and at times produce their own movies. He has won five Academy Awards and was the first director ever to win the Golden Palm Award at the Cann...

Schooled in low-budget filmmaking, Francis Ford Coppola (born 1939) has gone on to direct some of the most financially successful and critically acclaimed movies in U.S. cinematic history. Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather and its two seque...

William Cowper, English poet of the 18th century, is probably best known for lyrics of despair and isolation. Among these poems are "I am monarch of all I survey" and "The Task." The observations include matters of conversation from a poem written in July...

It was a relatively typical e-mail. "You are now part of a cult, and an anti-Christian cult at that," it said. "You pray to dead people, you worship statues, you love Mary more than Jesus, you obey a Pope who is the anti-Christ,...

The pathologist who did the initial autopsy on a woman whose husband is accused of killing her says he now believes she was suffocated.Michael Chambliss, the former Waukesha County medical examiner, testified Tuesday that he had changed his mind since taking the stand Monday in...

President Bush spoke from Air Force One Monday with Saad Hariri, leader of the majority party in Lebanon's parliament, partly about the Lebanese Army's showdown with Palestinian militants.National security adviser Stephen Hadley, speaking to reporters as Bush was traveling to Prague, said that Hariri requested...

The Conversation is remarkably ambitious and serious—a Hitchcockian thriller, a first-rate psychological portrait of a distinctive modern villain (a professional eavesdropper) and a bitter attack on American business values, all in one movie. I feel that Coppola has partially botched the thriller, but the film is a triumph none the less—gritty, complex, idiosyncratic…. The Conversation, which is about a man rather like Watergate bugger James McCord, profits from the great American natio...

Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation is a perplexing film about a wiretapper named Harry Caul who becomes involved in a murder. Harry is less a character in the traditional sense than he is a symbol or cipher for modern man immersed in a technological society that undermines human values and thwarts human needs. As a technician in this dehumanizing environment, Harry seems unwilling or unable to relate to people or to take the moral action necessary to change his life or even save the lives of oth...

[The Conversation calls strongly to mind] Antonioni's 1966 film, Blow-Up. Though this is most obvious in the actual "blow-up" (i.e., tape-deciphering) sequence itself, the resemblance extends from the painterly look of the film (some of the shots in Harry's apartment have an almost Vermeer-like quality of sculptured light) to such small details as the appearance of a mime in the opening sequence who seems to constitute a quite pointed reference to the mimes whose appearances brac...