A towering masterpiece in cinematic history.

Rating: 10/10 (26 May 2016)

It is sort of disheartening to read the plethora of negative reviews of this film on IMDb. There seems to be a fundamental gap between those who understand and appreciate the history and the evolution of cinema and those whose powers of perception and attention spans have been impaired by mind-numbing video games and by a culture of total immersion in the utter banality of "social media." I even read one negative review which seriously attempted to draw a comparison between "The Godfather" and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. I loved both movies by the way, but FOR CHRISSAKES! It's apples and oranges! One of those movies was a thoughtful, introspective ADULT film, which are few and far between. The other film, though great entertainment, was not.
The acting (across the board), the script (almost entirely Coppola's) and directing (entirely Coppola's) in the "The Godfather," though arguably equaled on occasion, have never been bested by any Hollywood or independent film. One qualification here: to the amazement of every film critic and everyone else alive in the 20th Century, the movie "The Godfather" was actually eclipsed by "The Godfather, Part II," which really needs to be seen back-to-back with "The Godfather" in order to fully appreciate either film. The two films in combination are really just the 1st and 2nd halves of Mario Puzo's pulp fiction book, entitled "The Godfather." Coppola's screenplay elevated Puzo's 2nd-rate prose immeasurably, and together those two films constitute the single greatest piece of epic-scale movie-making in the history of American cinema.