A terrifically entertaining movie, but deeply phony and morally dishonest.

Rating: 9/10 (1 April 2006)

You get a lot to enjoy in The Godfather, although I suspect that anyone who has not read the book before seeing the movie might occasionally lose track of the plot.
But the movie is morally crooked, because the Corleone Family are never shown doing anything criminal, other than killing off rival criminals in justifiable self-defense. Don Vito Corleone is a wise, benevolent patriarch to the Italian American community of New York, and gets into trouble with rival gangsters only because he refuses to take part in selling heroin. Unless you have been told that he is a criminal, you'd never know. You certainly never see the Corleones cheating or hurting honest citizens. That's what I mean when I say that the movie is crooked.
Compare the Corleones to TV's Sopranos. Tony Soprano is overtly criminal-a brutal, thieving, murdering, adulterous extortionist who pretends to adhere to a Mafia code, which he breaks whenever it suits him to break it. This is why The Sopranos is artistically superior to The Godfather. The creators of the Sopranos have actually dared to make Tony Soprano and his fellow criminals hateful, which is just what you would expect real criminals to be. Don Corleone, on the other hand, resembles a real human being about as much as Tarzan of the Apes.
So, great as The Godfather is as an entertainment, it fails as art.