The Godfather: Part II (John Cazale)

Show & Culture

The rise of a Sicilian in the American world of crime and the consolidation of his illegal empire by his son. “If The Godfather is a fairly traditional work, centered on the family and seeming to celebrate virtue, its sequel maintains a dialectic relationship with it. More complex in structure (journeying through time and space), it opens up to the outside world and politics and shows how power leads to solitude, while revealing the ethnic and economic structures of a world observed unflinchingly.” (Dictionnaire du cinéma, Larousse) “The performances, the gloomy camerawork, the stately pace and the sheer scale of the story’s sweep render everything engrossing and so, well, plausible that our ideas of organized crime in America will forever be marked by this movie.” (Time Out) “Three hours and 20 minutes of Al Pacino suffering openly, Robert Duvall suffering silently, Diane Keaton suffering noisily, and (every so often) Robert De Niro suffering good-naturedly is almost too much, but Francis Ford Coppola pulls it off in grand style.” (Chicago Reader)