The Godfather Part III

Skippable, and if you are going to watch it anyway, watch Coda instead, which is the next entry on this list and is the same film re-edited by Coppola in 2020. This page is about the 1990 version and why its reputation is both deserved and overstated.

The two films before it are among the best ever made, and arriving sixteen years later with a Vatican banking plot was never going to survive the comparison. The casting of Sofia Coppola as Mary, after Winona Ryder withdrew days before shooting, became the story of the film's release and has followed it ever since. It is a performance by someone who had not acted and did not want to, placed at the emotional centre of a film carrying two masterpieces behind it, and the criticism was ferocious in a way that had very little to do with the film and a great deal to do with her father having cast her.

What the film is reaching for is strong and mostly unrecognised. Michael is old, diabetic, and trying to buy absolution: he gives away a fortune, seeks a papal honour, confesses to a cardinal and says aloud what he did to Fredo, and discovers that the institution he is buying his way into is more corrupt than the one he is leaving. A man who cannot be forgiven and cannot stop asking is a real subject. Pacino plays it without vanity.

The opera finale is genuinely excellent and sits comfortably beside the baptism sequence it is deliberately echoing. The film around it is slack, the Vatican plotting is hard to follow, and Michael's final scene in the 1990 cut overreaches. Nothing in the series depends on it.