Pushing the Boundaries: The Godfather Part II (1974) 4K Restoration – 50th Anniversary
- Sat, Aug 17
- Sun, Aug 18
Director: Francis Ford Coppola Run Time: 202 min. Rating: R Release Year: 1974
Starring: Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, John Cazale, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall
Country: United States
Language: English, Italian, Spanish
The 1970s: Pushing the Boundaries
A Film Center retrospective on the most groundbreaking films to come out of the 1970s.
About the film:
This brilliant companion piece to the original The Godfather continues the saga of two generations of successive power within the Corleone family.
“The gestures, glances, and tonal registers between siblings position The Godfather as a primal story of love and devotion between a father and his children, and how siblings square off with each other in trying to live up to their father’s regality.”
-Niles Schwartz, Jake Cole, Slant Magazine
Coppola tells two stories in Part II: the roots and rise of a young Don Vito, played with uncanny ability by Robert De Niro, and the ascension of Michael (Al Pacino) as the new Don. Reassembling many of the talents who helped make The Godfather, Coppola has produced a movie of staggering magnitude and vision, and undeniably the best sequel ever made. Robert De Niro won an Academy Award; the film received six Academy Awards, including Best Picture of 1974.
About the filmmaker:
Francis Ford Coppola is an influential film director, producer, and screenwriter. Along with other New Hollywood filmmakers, his unconventional ideas challenged contemporary filmmaking and helped shape American cinema. In 1969, Coppola and George Lucas founded American Zoetrope, an innovative, independent film production company based in San Francisco that has produced feature films for directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Wim Wenders, Godfrey Reggio, and Coppola’s daughter Sofia.
Among his own projects, Coppola co-wrote the script for Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton (1970). He then revolutionized the gangster genre with The Godfather (1972). He won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Conversation (1974) followed by his vivid Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now (1979), making him one of only nine filmmakers to have won the award twice. His other features include The Rain People (1969), The Outsiders (1983), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and The Rainmaker (1997). Among other accolades, Coppola has won five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA). The Godfather Part II (1974) became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
See our upcoming films