The Godfather review: still the offer you can’t refuse
Over half a century on, Coppola’s mafia epic is still the film every other crime drama gets measured against. Brando, Pacino and three hours that feel nothing like three hours.
Reviewed, edited and approved by Editor-in-chief Daniel Sköld · Updated 25 October 2026
Contents
Some films you rewatch out of nostalgia. The Godfather you rewatch because it’s still better than nearly everything released since, and that gets more irritating the longer you think about it. It came out in 1972. Most of us were busy learning to walk or being dragged round Woolworths at the time, and it has been quietly showing up every crime drama since.
I hadn’t sat through the whole thing in one go for years. My excuse was that it’s nearly three hours long and I have a sofa that eats people alive after 9pm. Then I watched it again, and the three hours went by without me once checking my phone, which these days counts as a medical miracle.
Premiere1972-03-14
GenreDrama, Crime
CastMarlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall
Directed byFrancis Ford Coppola
Running time175 min
Rated15
Watch onParamount+
87%
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A wedding, a favour and a family business
The set-up is simple enough to fit on a beer mat. It covers the years 1945 to 1955 and follows the Corleones, a fictional Italian-American crime family in New York run by the patriarch Vito Corleone. It opens at a family wedding, where the Don takes requests for favours in a dim back office while the party goes on outside. Within a few scenes you know almost everyone, who owes what to whom, and where the trouble will come from.
Then someone tries to kill Vito. He barely survives, and his youngest son Michael, the one who wanted nothing to do with the family business, steps in to deal with the men responsible. That’s as much as I’ll tell you. If somehow you’ve got this far in life without seeing it, I envy you a bit and I won’t ruin it.
Brando, Pacino and a cast without a weak link
Francis Ford Coppola directs from a script he wrote with Mario Puzo, adapting Puzo’s bestselling novel. Marlon Brando plays Vito, Al Pacino plays Michael, and James Caan, Robert Duvall, Richard S. Castellano and Diane Keaton fill out the family and the people around it. Sterling Hayden, John Marley and Richard Conte are in there too, which tells you how deep the bench is.
Brando gets the impressions, the cotton wool in the cheeks, the hoarse murmur that half the blokes in Britain did at a wedding disco at some point in the 1980s. Strip away the parody and what’s left is a performance of remarkable restraint. His Vito barely raises his voice. He doesn’t need to. The power is in the stillness, the hands, the pause before he answers. He’s a gangster who acts like a country solicitor, and that’s far more frightening than any amount of shouting.
It’s easy to forget the film nearly didn’t happen this way. As The Sunday Post reported on the anniversary of the premiere, expectations were low: Brando was thought to be past his best, and Coppola was coming off a run of box-office flops. Paramount had paid only $80,000 for the film rights, and its first choices to direct turned it down. Hindsight makes everyone in that story look rather silly.
Brando may own the poster, but Pacino owns the film. Michael is the quiet war hero at the edge of the family photo, and watching him come in from the margins is the real story. It’s a performance built from tiny shifts: the set of his jaw, a flatness in his eyes. You don’t notice the change until it has already happened.
Brando gives The Godfather its legend, but it’s Pacino’s slow, cold transformation that makes it a masterpiece.
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What still works, and what creaks
Nearly everything works. The look of it, all deep shadows and burnished browns indoors and sun-drenched colour outside, still makes most modern prestige telly look like it was shot on a doorbell camera. Nino Rota’s score can make your hair stand up within three notes. And the film cares about family as much as it does about crime: the kitchens, the christenings and the noisy dinners matter as much as the bloodshed. That’s why the violence hits so hard when it comes.
On this side of the Atlantic, we’ve done hard-bitten gangsters very well ourselves. Think of The Long Good Friday. But British crime films tend to go for grime and grit. Coppola went for opera, and he got away with it.
The quibbles? The women are mostly left on the sidelines, which is partly the point, but it leaves Keaton’s Kay with less to do than she deserves in the first half. The pacing is unhurried in a way that may test anyone raised on two-minute TikToks. Some will also argue it makes these men far too glamorous. That’s fair, although the film is a lot less romantic about them than its reputation suggests.
What the critics said, then and now
The reviews were glowing from the very start. The Hollywood Reporter’s original 1972 review said each of the featured roles had been “cast to perfection”. It praised the way the script captured the warmth of family ties, and called the film “a curious film” that brings you round to understanding, and even condoning, the clan’s activities. That unease is still the film’s sharpest trick.
Time hasn’t dented it. On Metacritic it has a perfect Metascore of 100, based on 16 critic reviews, all of them positive. The awards haul matched the reviews: it won three Oscars, including best picture and best actor for Brando. When The Sunday Post looked back on the premiere, it noted that the film became the highest-grossing film up to that point and has topped many polls of the greatest films ever made.
Where to watch The Godfather in the UK
The Godfather premiered in New York on 14 March 1972. In the UK, it’s currently streaming on Paramount+, which makes sense given Paramount made it. It’s rated 15 and runs to 175 minutes, so put the kettle on before you start rather than halfway through. If you’d rather own it, it’s worth buying a decent physical copy for the home cinema setup. The photography deserves a bigger screen than a laptop balanced on your knees.
Verdict
The Godfather isn’t just a classic. It’s the yardstick every gangster film and crime drama since has been measured against, and it still comes out on top. Brando is magnetic, Pacino is chilling, and Coppola’s control of nearly three hours is astonishing. Essential viewing for anyone who hasn’t seen it, and a richer experience still for those of us who think we know it by heart.
Ashley Isaacs picks what's worth your evening – film, TV, streaming, music and books for men 45 and over with limited evenings and too many subscriptions. Reviews of what's new on Netflix, Prime Video, BBC iPlayer and the rest, crime dramas worth a weekend, and classics worth a second look. What's worth watching, what isn't, and where to find it in the UK.
One of Midcent's writers. Spotted something? Write to ashley@midcent.uk.
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