In August 1972, an amateur robbery of a Brooklyn bank branch turns into a fourteen-hour hostage standoff broadcast live to a crowd outside. Sidney Lumet's film, built from Frank Pierson's Oscar-winning script and Al Pacino's live-wire performance as Sonny Wortzik, treats the robbery as already lost from its first minute, following what happens to a small, desperate plan once it becomes public spectacle.
Michael Mann's 1995 crime epic pairs Al Pacino's LAPD detective against Robert De Niro's professional thief across a Los Angeles built from real locations and a case Mann first wrote up as a 1989 television film. Its bank-heist shootout, drilled for months with a former SAS trainer, and the single diner scene bringing its two leads together for the first time on screen remain the reasons it is still watched, even at 171 unhurried minutes.
Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo's novel follows the Corleone family as the youngest son, Michael, is pulled from war-hero outsider into the head of an organised-crime dynasty. Shot by Gordon Willis in interiors so underlit that faces disappear into shadow, scored by Nino Rota, and built on an ensemble led by Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, it cost Paramount $7 million and returned over $268 million, and swept that year's Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars.
Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 sequel cuts between young Vito Corleone's immigrant rise in early-twentieth-century New York, played by Robert De Niro, and Michael Corleone's ruthless consolidation of the family's power a generation later, played again by Al Pacino. Gordon Willis returns as cinematographer and Nino Rota as composer, on a budget of $13 million against a $48 million take, and the film won six Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, an unusual feat for a sequel.