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“... When​ he was nineteen or so, Al Pacino was taking acting lessons at the Herbert Berghof Studio on Sixth Avenue in New York while earning a living (just about) as a cleaner, busboy and removals man. At night, he sometimes took to the streets to declaim Shakespeare soliloquies, freed by the thought that he needed no one’s permission to play ‘Prospero, Falstaff, Shylock or Macbeth’ in the dark of the city:If the hour was late and you heard the sound of someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me, training myself on the great Shakespeare soliloquies … I’d do it by the factories, at the edges of town, where no one was around ...”

“... he is his own boss. What we have here is not a character made of contradictions and anguish, like Al Pacino in Godfather II, or of manic imaginings of perfect control, like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, but of all but impregnable denial. Washington/Lucas just sees himself as a decent, honourable man, whatever he does. He’s nice to his mother and he marries ...”

“... Another good moment combines technical commentary with celebrity anecdote. De Palma is shooting Al Pacino in Carlito’s Way (1993), on the run from the bad guys and racing through the carriages of a subway train. The camera is in another vehicle running parallel, so we get glimpses of our hero interrupted by passengers, the sides of the carriage, the ...”

“... Coppola’s astonishing troupe of actors: Robert Duvall, James Caan, Thalia Shire, Diane Keaton, Al Pacino. They make you feel not that this is the world of the Mafia, but that a dark world of family values, of murder and jollity and food and sentiment, can only be like this; and they make almost every gangster movie made since then look like a too ...”

“... Sheeran, as well as the same man at 55 and 83. For the record, Harvey Keitel (b. 1939), Al Pacino (b. 1940) and Joe Pesci (b. 1943) also get to inhabit different times, though Pacino, as Jimmy Hoffa, doesn’t live so long. All of these performances are amazing, but I would single out Pesci for special ...”

“... and the whole movie rests on the terrific admiration De Niro inspires in his cop counterpart Al Pacino. At one point, when Pacino hasn’t enough evidence to arrest De Niro, he tracks him down and they have a cup of coffee together, involving a gritty conversation full of mutual respect and regret that a man’s ...”

“... had. He was full of wows, sighs, grunts and asides, and he was revered by his supporting cast – Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, John Cazale – all of whom had grown up with Terry Malloy in their heads.Everyone knows the result; The Godfather is a modern classic (though close to fifty years old now). It won the Oscar for best picture and another ...”

“... of the film’s several great scenes he meets an agent, Marvin Schwarz, fabulously hammed up by Al Pacino, who explains to him that it’s not good to be defeated in film after film. Audiences start to think it’s you who’s the loser, not the string of characters you play. Schwarz has an ulterior motive. He wants Rick to believe he’s had it, so ...”

“... almost nothing is said. This calls for well-judged ham acting of the kind impeccably displayed by Al Pacino and Robert de Niro in Heat; and in Miami Vice both José (John Ortiz) and Jesus (Luis Tosar) make a fair show of being as sinister as they are supposed to be. The problem is that Colin Farrell, as Crockett, is not up to this kind of ...”

“... Joe Adonis, né Doto, who took the name Adonis on account he was so fucking good-looking. The ‘Al Capone of New Jersey’ was another good-looking guy named Longy Zwillman, whose favourite party trick was to produce from his wallet a pubic hair belonging to Jean Harlow, with whom he’d had a hot affair. The local headquarters for these men was an Italian ...”

“... Mafiosi: before then they were played by Cagney and Bogart, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson. Al Pacino and Robert de Niro changed all that. Now I concentrated on two Actors B and D, who were not Italian-American. I had surreptitiously met Actor B, my original choice, while I was at Fox meeting a producer from Columbia. He was nice but depressed and ...”

“... gave straight onto the street where children played in the dust. There was a vintage poster of Al Pacino as Serpico on the wall. Yeheno’s younger sister was preparing coffee – a bed of pepper-tree leaves, a scraping of frankincense in the burner, the sharp tonic of the first infusion (etiquette demands you take three, the last being quite ...”

“... still had manifest problems with their scripts. It was probably a mistake to employ stars like Al Pacino (Revolution) and Robert de Niro (The Mission): they are not only expensive in themselves, they make everything else expensive, since nothing around them can be cheap. It was certainly a mistake for Goldcrest to get so deep into television, out of ...”

“... treat entire TV shows and Hollywood films as found images: Pierre Huyghe has reshot parts of the Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon with the real-life protagonist (a reluctant bank-robber) returned to the lead role, and Douglas Gordon has adapted a couple of Hitchcock films in drastic ways (his 24 Hour Psycho slows down the original to a near-catatonic ...”

“... composer Miklós Rózsa, two leading actors from Fedora (Marthe Keller and William Holden), and Al Pacino, who is visiting Keller, his girlfriend. The conversation turns to the curious absence of Nazis in postwar Germany, and one of the German guests remembers a line from Wilder’s film One, Two, Three. Asked what he did in the war, a man says he was ...”