Al Pacino came out of the Actors Studio and spent the 1970s giving performances built almost entirely on stillness. Michael Corleone barely raises his voice across two films, and the effect of watching him decide things behind his eyes is the reason The Godfather works.
Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Scarface followed, and the range in those three is remarkable: a quiet man being ground down, a chaotic man improvising in public, and a performance so large it entered the culture as a set of quotations.
He won Best Actor for Scent of a Woman, which is generally regarded as a compensation prize for the earlier nominations he lost. The shouting register that arrived around that film has dominated the later work.
Heat gave him one of his best late performances and the diner scene with De Niro is the first time the two shared a frame, which the film treats with appropriate weight.
Al PacinoThe Insider (1999) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Michael Mann made a two-and-a-half-hour thriller about a man giving a television interview, in which the entire plot is legal procedure and corporate liability, and it is one…
Al PacinoCarlito's Way (1993) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. De Palma tells you Carlito dies in the first ninety seconds and then makes you hope for two and a half hours that he will not. Sean Penn…
Al PacinoSidney Lumet's 1975 Brooklyn bank heist. Attica, Wyoming, sweltering New York summer.
Al PacinoMike Newell's 1997 undercover FBI drama. Donnie Brasco is Mike Newell's 1997 American crime drama.
Al Pacino2003 Martin Brest crime comedy with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Career-damaging flop during Bennifer tabloid frenzy.
Al PacinoThe Devil's Advocate is Taylor Hackford's 1997 American supernatural legal thriller adapting Andrew Neiderman's 1990 novel. The work is one of the principal supernatural legal thrillers ever produced and one of the strongest Pacino late-career performances.
Al PacinoCoppola's 1974 sequel-and-prequel. De Niro as young Vito, Pacino as Michael.
Al Pacino
Abe VigodaThe Godfather is the best film ever made from a craft perspective. Not the most entertaining, not the most beloved, not the most influential, though it is all three.
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