10 Weirdest Films To Come From Celebrated Directors

Francis Ford Coppola is widely regarded as one of the greatest directors of the '70s: he is the director behind Apocalypse Now and The Godfather trilogy. However, as times change, Coppola has reached into many different genres in order to stay relevant and profitable. In 1996, to keep up with the success of family-friendly comedy movies, he made the film Jack alongside Robin Williams.

In this movie, Williams plays a young boy with progeria – an aging disorder – as he grows up and attends school, getting bullied and making token friends as he does. It’s a film as saccharine and whimsical as you can imagine, with every overused cliché that 90s cinema can offer. Critics hated the movie at the time, stating that “Robin Williams' childlike energy is channeled in all the wrong places with Jack, a bizarre tragedy that aims for uplift but sinks deep into queasy schmaltz.” One can sense that there were attempts to tell a dramatic, touching story, but Coppola’s answer to Tom Hank’s Big just wasn’t good enough for the market.

The idea that the mind behind acclaimed and legendary films went on to make this silly little movie that belittles a very real disease is almost unfathomable. It speaks volumes as to how Coppola tried to stay relevant, but the best years of his career were certainly behind him.