The Godfather
Academy Award × 3·AFI #2·BFI #12·National Film Registry
Rent/Purchase
Spanning the years 1945 to 1955, a chronicle of the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. When organized crime family patriarch, Vito Corleone barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son, Michael steps in to take care of the would-be killers, launching a campaign of bloody revenge.
What critics thought
Virtually every critic who has written about The Godfather in the five decades since its release has landed in the same place: it is one of the defining achievements in American cinema, a film that uses the Mafia saga to tell a broader story about power, family, and moral corruption. The lone significant contemporary dissent came from Stanley Kauffmann, who found Pacino miscast and took aim at Brando's makeup and Nino Rota's score — a minority view that has only grown more isolated as the film's reputation has solidified into something close to consensus perfection.
“The Godfather is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new tragic realism.”
Pauline Kael·The New Yorker
“Coppola has found a style and a visual look for all this material so "The Godfather" becomes something of a rarity: a really good movie squeezed from a bestseller.”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
“most brutal and moving chronicles of American life”
The New York Times
“rattles around in a part too demanding for him”
Stanley Kauffmann·The New Republic
Genres
Crime, Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorFrancis Ford Coppola
StarringMarlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Richard S. Castellano
ComposerNino Rota
The Godfather
Academy Award × 3·AFI #2·BFI #12·National Film Registry
Spanning the years 1945 to 1955, a chronicle of the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. When organized crime family patriarch, Vito Corleone barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son, Michael steps in to take care of the would-be killers, launching a campaign of bloody revenge.
What critics thought
Virtually every critic who has written about The Godfather in the five decades since its release has landed in the same place: it is one of the defining achievements in American cinema, a film that uses the Mafia saga to tell a broader story about power, family, and moral corruption. The lone significant contemporary dissent came from Stanley Kauffmann, who found Pacino miscast and took aim at Brando's makeup and Nino Rota's score — a minority view that has only grown more isolated as the film's reputation has solidified into something close to consensus perfection.
“The Godfather is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new tragic realism.”
Pauline Kael·The New Yorker
“Coppola has found a style and a visual look for all this material so "The Godfather" becomes something of a rarity: a really good movie squeezed from a bestseller.”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
“most brutal and moving chronicles of American life”
The New York Times
“rattles around in a part too demanding for him”
Stanley Kauffmann·The New Republic
Genres
Crime, Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorFrancis Ford Coppola
StarringMarlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Richard S. Castellano
ComposerNino Rota
Rent/Purchase