Every Francis Ford Coppola Movie Ranked Worst To Best

The inspiration for this article was simple: Which Godfather film is the best of them all? But the truth is, Francis Ford Coppola's best movie isn't a Godfather project at all, but his searing paranoid thriller The Conversation, released the same year as The Godfather Part II (a fact which hammers home just how impressive his career was throughout the 70s).

The Conversation follows veteran surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), an emotionally distant man haunted by a past assignment and caught in deadly moral dilemma. At the centre of the movie is a recording of two people, who seem to believe they're in danger, and Caul's powerful client (Robert Duvall), who is rarely seen but whose presence guides the story.

From the tragic performance of Hackman, the sobering assessment of the surveillance state to the troubling mystery that comes to a head with one of the best movie twists ever filmed, The Conversation is Coppola's one true masterpiece, and a film that speaks to the current state of the world better than any other post-Watergate drama.

Apocalypse Now is epic, The Godfather is great, Part II is even better, but The Conversation is the best movie Coppola has ever made.