10 Great Directors Who Haven't Made Anything Good For Years

7. Francis Ford Coppola

Such has been the contrast in impact between Francis Ford Coppola's early and contemporary career that most people don't even realise he's still making films. Well, he is, and they're terrible. Coppola wasn't just at the peak of his powers in the 1970s, he was at the very peak of cinema. Parts 1 and 2 of the Godfather and Apocalypse Now could easily, even today, be considered the top 3 films to have even been made, but his career since has seen him slide gradually into irrelevance.

A Las Vegas musical in One From The Heart, the coming-of-age Outsiders, a drama of gang members making good in Rumble Fish, and the Preston Tucker biopic were his most noteworthy contributions to the 80s, but all received mixed reviews at best. The less said about his attempts to rekindle his success with 1990's The Godfather Part III the better. Most recently he directed, produced, and wrote Twixt, a horror thriller starring Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning - an exploration of the dream world merging with the waking world that was labelled as frankly unwatchable.

The popularisation of the term "modern-day-Coppola", because it's simply too upsetting for film lovers to have to use the name of the man who directed Apocalypse Now when referring the this sort of guff, shows how bad the last 35 years have been for him. His winery's flourishing though, apparently.