Brilliant

Rating: 9/10 (21 January 2016)

Brilliant action-drama-thriller. Directed by Michael Mann, and starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Historic in that this is the only movie that these two mega-legends of the screen have appeared in together.
Excellent plot and direction. Mann gives the characters depth and builds the tension and drama. This is the movie where Michael Mann demonstrated the cinematographic style that would be his trademark: the use of colour and light on dark, the beautiful high-resolution night scenes. Visually amazing.
Great acting by De Niro and, to a lesser extent, Pacino, but you would expect that. Pacino maybe overdoes the theatrics, though. As an indication of the magnitude of the main stars, Val Kilmer, Jon Voight and Amy Brenneman, major stars in their own right, get fairly secondary roles and Tom Sizemore and Ashley Judd have fairly minor roles. All perform superbly.