Special thanks to Kate Brennan (Paramount); May Haduong (Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences); Brian Block (Criterion Pictures); Caitlin Robertson (Twentieth Century Fox); Christopher Lane, Katie Fry, Helena Brissenden (Sony Pictures); Marilee Womack (Warner Bros.); Mike Maggiore; Paola Mojica; and Jerry Schatzberg.

"Has any other performer so fully dominated their cultural moment?
ON VIEW, FOR ONE WEEK ONLY, IS THE WIDEST RANGE TO EVER MARK A YOUNG HOLLYWOOD CAREER!"
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

"Film Forum's new series doesn't just present a chance to revisit iconic performances from a great actor.
It also offers the opportunity to tour a New York that no longer exists. Every title is worth making time for!"
– Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

FEBRUARY 18 FRI

THE GODFATHER

(1972, Francis Ford Coppola) “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone is back from WWII and opting out of The Family, until an attempted hit on dad Marlon Brando pulls him back in. Oscars for Best Picture, Screenplay, and Actor — to Brando, though Supporting Actor-nominated Pacino’s part is bigger.
1:00, 4:30, 8:00

View the Trailer

"Michael is the great role of modern American movies, and it lives with Pacino still… If acting for movies is allowing the camera to look within or through the surface, then Pacino achieves something remarkable, for he leads The Godfather from a study of the world of action to the immobile reverie of a lonely tyrant."
– David Thomson

“Possibly the greatest movie ever made.” – Stanley Kubrick

"One of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment...
The gangster movie come of age, truly sorrowful, exciting, without the false piety of the films that flourished forty years ago."
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times

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FEBRUARY 19 SAT

THE GODFATHER PART II

(1974, Francis Ford Coppola) Prequel and sequel to the original, as Pacino’s Michael consolidates his empire after dabbling in Cuban futures and vets the family for weaklings, while Oscar winner Robert De Niro, as the young Godfather-to-be, takes on the bosses of turn-of-the-20th-century Little Italy.
1:00, 4:45, 8:30

View the Trailer

"The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film. Visually, Part II is far more complexly beautiful than the first, just as it’s thematically richer, more shadowed, fuller… An epic vision of the corruption of America."
– Pauline Kael

"Coppola's superior sequel to his own very fine Mafia epic [is an] elliptical and elegantly orchestrated narrative charted with a terrifying lucidity. The performances, Gordon Willis' memorably 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 organised crime in America will forever be marked by this movie."
– Geoff Andrews, Time Out London

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FEBRUARY 20 SUN (Separate Admission for each part)

THE GODFATHER MARATHON

THE GODFATHER: 1:00, 8:20
View the Trailer

THE GODFATHER PART II: 4:30
View the Trailer

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FEBRUARY 21 MON

THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK

(1971, Jerry Schatzberg) Scintillating debut for Pacino, as a small-time crook leading decent Kitty Winn (Best Actress, Cannes) on the downhill heroin path. Schatzberg’s second film established him as a major stylist. Screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. “Pacino proved he didn’t need Coppola to make him act.” – Time Out (London).
1:10, 3:20, 5:30, 7:45, 10:00

"PACINO IS A FORCE OF NATURE.
This mop-topped motormouth is as wired as Robert DeNiro's Johnny Boy and as cute as Woody Allen's Alvy Singer.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

“A QUINTESSENTIAL 70s MOVIE! One of the most gifted and original filmmakers to emerge during the 70s, Schatzberg combines a photographer’s eye for telling detail with a psychologist’s passion for the twists and turns of human motivation."
– Dave Kehr, The New York Times

“Before Requiem for a Dream and Sid and Nancy, there was The Panic in Needle Park.
A harrowing 1971 New York tragedy.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

“A starmaking performance by Al Pacino as a junkie lowlife, a screenplay by Joan Didion and husband John Gregory Dunne, and director Jerry Schatzberg's grimy, sweaty portrait of downscale Manhattan, circa 1971. WHY THE HELL ISN'T THIS SEEN AS A PERIOD CLASSIC THE WAY TAXI DRIVER IS? THIS IS GENRE-DEFINING CINEMA, AND YOU SHOULDN'T MISS IT.”
– Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com

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FEBRUARY 22 TUE

DOG DAY AFTERNOON

(1975, Sidney Lumet) As a scorcher unravels from day to night in Brooklyn, the motive for Sonny Wortzik’s (Pacino) botched bank robbery/ hostage taking is revealed to be the funding of his second (male) wife’s sex-change operation — based on an actual case. “The most flamboyant of Lumet’s New York movies” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times.
2:00, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30

"Remains the director's sublime achievement. Pacino simultaneously comes across like Mick Jagger and a kid itching for a schoolyard fight."
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

"One of Sidney Lumet's best jobs of directing and one of Al Pacino's best performances… it's an astonishing fusion of suspense and character, powered by superior ensemble acting."
– Jonathan Rosenbaum

“A quintessential New Wave masterpiece."
– Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice

“One of the best New York movies ever made. Lumet keeps so much low comedy and crazy melodrama going on in the bank,
on the street, among the police, that he can risk the long, quiet scenes that draw us in.”
– Pauline Kael

“There is plenty of Lumet’s vital best here in a film that captures the increasingly garish pathology of our urban life.”
– Jack Kroll, Newsweek

“Brisk, humorous and alive with urban energies and angers fretting through the 92 degree heat.”
– Sight and Sound

“Sidney Lumet's most accurate, most flamboyant New York movie—consistently vital and energetic. It's beautifully acted by performers
who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.
If you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny,
but mostly it's reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids easy speculation.”
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“Manages to run the gamut between farce and tragedy. It is almost a Brechtian parable.
Claims our attention not only as a fine piece of filmmaking, balanced on a knife-edge, but as dialogue for the time.”
– Derek Malcolm

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FEBRUARY 23 WED

SERPICO

(1973, Sidney Lumet) Pacino’s Frank Serpico flashes back from his beginnings as a naïve, idealistic police recruit to a bearded, hippielike undercover detective in a relentless mission against corrupt cops. Al’s powerhouse performance vaulted him to the front rank of American actors.
2:00, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30

"A virtuoso performance by Al Pacino and some expert location work by Sidney Lumet add up to a tour de force genre piece that transcends the supercop conventions to create a moving, engrossing portrait."
– Chicago Reader

"A landmark policier that serves up the definitive '70s-actor Jesus Christ pose. Lumet is at the peak of his fanatical pursuit of New York realism, benefiting from his expert eye for unglamorous locations, low-key casting, and. most immeasurably, the ace contribution of editor Dede Allen, chomping down hard on the end of takes with snappy punctuation. Springsteen sang in the year of the film's release: 'It's hard to be a saint in the city.’ Serpico nails saint and city both."
- Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

"You can practically taste the sizzle and stink on the mean streets of this classic police-corruption thriller. Endures as one of the great Rotten Apple flicks. Less political expose than existential docu-drama, an examination of the shivers of space between different kinds of rocks and hard places. Gloweringly intense, Mr. Pacino skates the edge between righteous and paranoid. His trapped-animal ferocity is riveting, method acting at crystal-meth intensity. Serpico gets its charge by running this live wire through the expressionist decrepitude of Mr. Lumet's New York, an edgy, abject metropolis of grubby tenements, shabby boho street life, brutalist architecture, and dingy Manhattan skylines."
– Nathan Lee, New York Sun

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FEBRUARY 24 THU

...AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

(1979, Norman Jewison) “The whole trial is out of order!” Tough choice for Baltimore lawyer Al Pacino: defend a hated enemy, icy judge John Forsythe, on a rape charge — or get disbarred. Pacino’s fifth Oscar nomination of the decade.
1:10, 3:20, 5:30

“An angry comedy crossed with an expose and held together by one of those high-voltage Al Pacino performances that's so sure of itself we hesitate to demur.”
– Roger Ebert

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FEBRUARY 24 THU (Separate Admission)

SCARECROW

(1973, Jerry Schatzberg) Drifters Al Pacino and Gene Hackman meander cross-country from California to Detroit, toward a shattering conversation with an alienated wife. Subtexts galore in the Cannes Grand Prix winner — and U.S. sleeper — with the two stars at the top of their forms. Print courtesy Academy Film Archive.
7:40*, 9:50 (Please note: this screening may start 5-10 minutes late.)

"THE QUINTESSENTIAL ROAD TRIP MOVIE! PACINO AND HACKMAN AT THEIR FINEST!"
– The Village Voice

"A down-and-out duet between two of cinema's finest actors.
The young Pacino is always freshly startling for those raised on his gruff, bellowing 90s persona. This is an easygoing buddy/road picture
with the same tossed-off 70s appeal as Mike Nichols'
The Fortune or Ulu Grosbard's Straight Time."
– The L Magazine

"Pacino is a sustained delight in an uncharacteristically goofy, comic role, and his strong chemistry with Hackman favorably recalls the central dynamic in Midnight Cowboy. Scarecrow works beautifully as an extended actor's duet, but the other major force at play is cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who lends the film a radiant twilight beauty."
– Nathan Rabin, The Onion A.V. Club

“One of the great '70s ‘road movies.’ Schatzberg's moody portrayal of two drifters is graced with brilliantly intense performances by Gene Hackman and Al Pacino and a cool, poetic sense of the American landscape.”
– Chicago Tribune

“One of those lyric stream-of-consciousness road movies that only the '70s seemed able to produce.”
– Scott Foundas, The Village Voice

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