The Godfather, Part II

Novelist Mario Puzo’s pulp melodramatics were given operatic grandeur in director Francis Ford Coppola’s first Godfather, but the movie wasn’t quite the metaphorical epic that some critics claimed. That trick was pulled off in the follow-up, a haunting, fatalistic vision of the downside of the American Dream that plays like Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. Coppola later reedited the two films into a seamless chronological whole (for TV and video). But in terms of theatrical releases, The Godfather, Part II remains the champ. A+