Say hello to my little compendium! Al Pacino films – ranked | Al Pacino

With greased-back hair, dainty spectacles and bristly chops, Pacino is a former Little League baseball coach turned locksmith. But – symbolism alert! – who holds the key to his clenched heart? One scene gives good cringe: over a would-be romantic dinner with a bank teller (Holly Hunter), he starts reminiscing about his great lost love, oblivious to his date’s escalating indignation.

No surprise that Oliver Stone’s football drama is frenzied, overloaded and unsubtle. At least it has at its centre a performance of style and grace by Pacino. He plays the idealistic coach of the fictional Miami Sharks, who sees the game as a test of character. “On any given Sunday, you’re gonna win or you’re gonna lose,” he says. “The point is – can you win or lose like a man?”

Christopher Nolan’s atmospheric remake of a 1997 Norwegian thriller puts Pacino in the Stellan Skarsgård role of the cop whose guilt over past and present misdeeds hounds him through the sleepless nights of a new murder case. Fascinating to see both Pacino and Robin Williams (as the unctuous killer) dialling down their usual mania for the most part.

17. The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

This Faustian horror-comedy starring Pacino as the devil, exerting his malign influence through his own law firm, will be a keeper for any fans of Shouty Al. Others will tire more quickly of his carnival barker routine and this one-joke movie in which he tempts greenhorn attorney Keanu Reeves over to the dark side. The satanic mood is enhanced by the use of Donald Trump’s apartment as a set.

It was Pacino who proposed a remake of the 1932 gangster classic (“I want to be Paul Muni,” he said) and original director Sidney Lumet who made his character, Tony Montana, a Cuban refugee arriving in Miami in 1980 as part of the Mariel boatlift. Any objections to the overkill of Pacino’s showboating turn and Brian De Palma’s adrenalised direction can be easily countered. “Bombast was part of what we were trying to say,” said Pacino. None of which makes the film and his performance any less exhausting or impoverished an experience.

Forget received wisdom: some value the troubled third instalment of Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster saga above its predecessors. Headmaster of that school of thought is Luca Guadagnino, who praised its “longing” and “melancholy” and called it “the best of the three … Part II is too perfect and The Godfather is too legendary”. For all the movie’s flaws, it is impossible not to be moved by Pacino, his gaze mournful and haunted (though he wasn’t even 50 when the film was made). His silent scream in the final moments is a moving expression of grief and despair.

14. Sea of Love (1989)

This fine, lean thriller, scripted by Richard Price, tempted Pacino back to cinema after four years spent licking his wounds – and rediscovering himself on stage – after the public humiliation of Revolution, Hugh Hudson’s infamous flop about the American war of independence. Pacino is affecting as the frazzled cop falling for a suspect (Ellen Barkin), while hunting a murderer who lures victims via lonely hearts ads.

13. Looking for Richard (1996)

Lightness doesn’t come easily to Pacino (see … And Justice For All or Author! Author!) but he is rather a fragrant presence in this documentary, which he also directed, where he endeavours to get to the bottom of Richard III while playing the role. Adam Mars-Jones called Pacino’s appearance as himself “a revelation, coming from an actor who has studiously avoided comic likenesses on screen”. Of course, that was before Jack and Jill (“Say hello to my chocolate blend …”).

Protests by gay activists disrupted shooting and dogged the release of William Friedkin’s film maudit, starring Pacino as a cop going undercover to catch a killer in New York’s leather scene. Convinced that the movie was exploitative, the actor donated his fee to LGBTQ+ charities, which was generous but also shortsighted: Cruising has aged brilliantly, and plays now like a clever critique of homophobia as well as a daring outlier in an age of timidity.

It is impossible to say how many people Pacino has called a cunt. But surely he has never delivered the insult with more relish than he does to Kevin Spacey’s office manager in this film of David Mamet’s Pulitzer-winning play about cut-throat real-estate salesmen. Mamet adds a sizzling prologue with a shark-like new character played by Alec Baldwin, while Pacino dominates as smooth-talking top-seller Ricky Roma. He received an Oscar nomination (his seventh of nine) and returned to the play on Broadway in 2012, this time in the Jack Lemmon role of washed-up veteran Shelley Levene.

In Pacino’s first film, Me, Natalie (1969), he was glimpsed briefly as a Jack-the-lad prowling the dancefloor. In his second, co-written by Joan Didion, he was the lead: a heroin addict (“I ain’t hooked, I’m just chippin’”) who introduces his new girlfriend (Kitty Winn) to the needle. At peak prettiness here, Pacino initially seems ill-suited to inhabiting such a corroded soul. That only makes his decline more pronounced: he overdoses in a sex worker’s apartment, then has to be dragged into the bathroom along with her wailing baby before her next client arrives.

An old lags’ reunion, with movie mobsters Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel drawn back to their capo, Martin Scorsese. Pacino, 79, and working with the director for the first time, counts as the new kid on the block. He plays charismatic Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, and has a few choice ding-dongs with Stephen Graham as the upstart who rubs him up the wrong way. The movie’s palette runs from autumnal to wintry, but Pacino’s colourful portrayal stands out like a knickerbocker glory at a wake.

8. Donnie Brasco (1997)

Johnny Depp is the FBI agent infiltrating a New York crime family, but the movie belongs to Pacino, who is unbearably poignant as Lefty, the lowly, down-at-heel mob lieutenant taking him under his wing. British director Mike Newell compared Pacino to Alec Guinness in his habit of building a character through costume, but ran into trouble by not giving the actor enough closeups. “You mistake my art,” Pacino said after storming off set. “You don’t value me.”

7. Heat (1995)

After Righteous Kill, The Irishman and their glossy joint promos for the Moncler clothing brand, it’s no longer a novelty to see Pacino and Robert De Niro together on screen. But when they shared the same frame for the first time as mirror-image cop-and-robber adversaries in Michael Mann’s thriller, it was positively headline-grabbing. Their coffee-shop conflab is a little gem of unfussy intensity. Elsewhere, Pacino’s more cuckoo line readings (exhibit A: “Cause she’s got a great ass! And you got your head all the way up it!”) are informed by his character’s cocaine addiction – a detail which Mann excised in the edit, leaving the actor looking inexplicably deranged.

6. Carlito’s Way (1993)

Brian De Palma executes a string of intricate set-pieces, beginning with a pool-hall ambush and climaxing with a Grand Central Station shootout; Sean Penn throws caution and vanity to the wind as a crooked lawyer with an Art Garfunkel frizz; and Pacino is full of unembarrassed romantic longing as the ex-con trying to go straight. This is him at his most sweetly sincere. As well as his most impatient: the actor grew so exasperated by a tricky shot in which he was travelling on a subway train while being filmed from a second train running on a parallel track, that he hijacked his one and headed home for the day.

5. Scarecrow (1973)

Fresh from the first Godfather, Pacino returned to Jerry Schatzberg, who had launched his screen career in The Panic in Needle Park, for this melancholic buddy movie, ravishingly shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, about two drifters ambling across the US. Gene Hackman is the sour, volatile ex-convict who dreams of opening a carwash, Pacino the ingenuous former sailor holding a candle – well, a lamp, which he carries everywhere with him – for his young child (girl or boy, he’s not sure: they’ve never met). It was one of Hackman’s favourites among his own movies but Pacino came around to the film’s bruised charms only latterly. He wrote in his memoir Sonny Boy that a recent viewing left him “surprised by how powerful it was, how strongly I felt its impact”.

The mesmerising prequel sections, with Robert De Niro as the ambitious young immigrant Vito Corleone, lend the picture its vitality and far outstrip the sequel component of the film, with its sluggish Havana politicking. But Pacino is still hypnotic as Michael Corleone, now calcified by power and wearing his cruelty like a cowl. An infernal heat rages in his standoffs with his thwarted wife Kay (Diane Keaton) and weaselly, disloyal brother Fredo (John Cazale). There is an undeniable frisson, too, in seeing Pacino share the screen with one of his mentors, the Method titan Lee Strasberg, as gangster Hyman Roth, even if the film’s killer grip has grown slack with time.

The role of Frank Serpico, the real-life NYPD cop who became a pariah after refusing to take bribes like his bad-apple colleagues, feels analogous to the actor playing him: in his self-righteous purity and stubborn eccentricity, Serpico is the Al Pacino of law enforcement. He’s a straight-shooter with unorthodox ways of expressing himself; the more closely he adheres to his principles, the wackier he becomes, acquiring pets (a mouse, a sheepdog, a parakeet) and ever-expanding facial hair like an actor amassing props and quirks. Shouty Al even gets an early outing: “I can shout anywhere!” he boasts, disturbing fellow diners in a cafe. Director Sidney Lumet spotted the symbiosis of actor and role: “With Serpico, I was constantly ambivalent about his character. He was such a pain in the ass sometimes. Always kvetching. Al Pacino made me love him, not the scripted character.”

“The studio didn’t want Pacino” to play Michael Corleone, said the casting director Fred Roos. “They thought he was a shrimp, funny-looking, not attractive.” But Coppola and Robert Duvall lobbied for him, as did Marcia Lucas, wife of George, who cut together his screen tests and told Coppola: “Cast Pacino, because he addresses you with his eyes.” And what eyes: soulful and imploring in the early scenes but indomitable by the time he closes the door on Kay in the final shot. If the central tragedy of The Godfather is Michael’s gradual moral decline, Pacino reveals the ways in which he is already subtly corrupted, right from his opening scene in which he recounts to Kay the story of how his father once made a recalcitrant associate “an offer he couldn’t refuse”. Each subsequent step takes him further down the ladder into hell.

The world can live without Pacino romancing Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman or playing Han Solo in Star Wars – to name two high-profile parts he turned down – but the thought that he passed initially on Dog Day Afternoon due to exhaustion from making the second Godfather movie is too awful to contemplate. (Fortunately, he regained his senses once he learned Dustin Hoffman was sniffing around the role.)

In more than half a century of on-screen brooding, smouldering and maniacal outbursts, there is still nothing as magnificently textured as Pacino’s performance in Sidney Lumet’s heist-gone-haywire masterpiece, a film teetering simultaneously on the brink of heartbreak and farce. As Sonny, who holds up a bank in the middle of a sweltering New York summer to fund his lover’s gender affirmation surgery, he was Oscar-nominated and should have won. (He should have won for anything except the film he did win for: 1992’s Scent of a Woman.)

Pacino acts here with nerve endings exposed and antennae twitching. His range is extraordinary, from the barnstorming crowd scenes (“Attica! Attica!”) to the intimate confidences shared with his co-conspirator (John Cazale) and lover (Chris Sarandon). His alertness extended to the tiniest details: after watching the first day’s footage, Pacino persuaded Lumet to re-shoot the opening scene in which he had been wearing glasses. His reason? Sonny’s travails should begin with neglecting to bring those glasses with him on the biggest day of his life.