The Godfather

The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.
IMDb rating: 9.2
Metascore: 100
Storyline: The Godfather "Don" Vito Corleone is the head of the Corleone mafia family in New York. He is at the event of his daughter's wedding. Michael, Vito's youngest son and a decorated WW II Marine is also present at the wedding. Michael seems to be uninterested in being a part of the family business ...

20. The Godfather (1972). When you outlaw drugs and gambling, you get corrupt politicians and cops, murder, and great gangster movies.

The Godfather is one of the great movies of the last several years, and its enormous popularity is eminently well deserved. In the first place. it is a decidedly Old Culture movie, or "movie-movie"; it is gloriously arriere-garde, and there is not a trace of the avant-garde gimmicks and camera trickery ... It is a picture with heroes and villains ... The pace is terrific, the suspense and plot and direction and acting all excellent. Many of the lines are memorable, and "we're going to make him an offer he can't refuse" has already burned its way indelibly into American culture.

[T]he great classic, the definitive, superb Mafia movie was The Godfathers I and II, in which Francis Ford Coppola poured out a work of genius, grounded in his own and novelist Mario Puzo's cultural history, which he has never approached since ... The key to The Godfathers and to success in the Mafia genre is the realization and dramatic portrayal of the fact that the Mafia, although leading a life outside the law, is, at its best, simply entrepreneurs and businessmen supplying the consumers with goods and services of which they have been unaccountably deprived by a Puritan WASP culture.

Certainly the best film of 1972 was The Godfather, which we have already hailed in these pages. The Godfather is us classicists' candidate in the award sweepstakes. Already, of course. both the masses and the intelligentsia have spoken: the masses by perceptively making The Godfather the box-office smash of all time; the intellectuals by rejecting it for avant-gard tinsel ... For best actor it's for me a tossup between Al Pacino and Marlon Brando in our favorite movie. Brando's acting was a mighty and brilliant tour de force, by far the best Brando in that actor's checkered career.

[T]he Godfather movies bring those who are willing to the recognition of the true nature of men in power. Underneath all the pomp and circumstance, all the glad-handing and talk of serving the people, the various gangsters in power over us ultimately always have "an offer that you can't refuse." Lord Acton taught us that "Power corrupts". In surveying mass murder by the state, Professor Rummel updated that to "Power kills". In these three masterpieces by Francis Ford Coppola, we have this lesson re-taught for our times. If you thought these were just gangster films, you missed the point.