The Godfather Part II

Essential, and for many people the better of the two. It is also the film whose structure is its entire argument, which is why the chronological recut lower down this list is a curiosity rather than an improvement.

Two stories run in parallel. The young Vito arrives at Ellis Island with nothing, builds a neighbourhood around himself, and takes his first life out of something recognisable as obligation. Michael, fifty years later, has more power than his father ever held and is systematically emptying his own house: he loses Nevada, loses Kay, learns what Fredo did, and has his brother killed. Neither story comments on the other out loud. The cutting does it. A scene of Vito being embraced by his neighbours lands against a scene of Michael sitting alone, and the film never once tells you what to conclude.

Fredo is the heart of it, and the two scenes people remember are the two halves of the same relationship: the kiss in Havana, where Michael says he knows it was him and breaks his heart, and the lake, which Michael arranges and does not watch. Cazale is extraordinary in a part that could have been pathetic and is instead unbearable.

It runs three hours and twenty minutes and earns every one of them. The one caution: the Senate hearing material and the Cuban business assume you were paying attention in the first film, so this is not a sequel to drop into cold.