Al Pacino movies
THE RANKING
Four Empire writers. Eleven movies. Ordered definitively.
Illustration: Jacey
OUR CRITICS
NICK DE SEMLYEN Loves ranking Pacino films. It keeps him sharp, on the edge, where he gotta be.
IAN FREER Where does he keep his Al Pacino boxset? In his “Attica! Attica! Attica!”
CHRIS HEWITT Carrying extra choc weight. He knows it was you, Freddo, and it broke his heart.
DAN JOLIN Wishes Dunkaccinos existed in real life. Say hello to his chocolate blend.
Chris: When did we first encounter Al Pacino?
Ian: I grew up in a Godfather household.
Dan: You were in the Mafia?
Ian: Yeah. And there was a TV version of it where it was cut into episodes. We had it on VHS. That’s where I first saw him.
Chris: Wasn’t it in chronological order? You would have taken a long time to get to him.
Dan: I think my first encounter was the novelisation of Scarface. My dad had a copy and I grabbed it and started reading it, and then my mum found it and took it off me because I was too young. I never got past that. And the irony is, when I saw the movie I didn’t like it. But Heat was one of the first movies I ever wrote a feature about, for my student newspaper. I did a chart of Pacino and De Niro, and how hard they are, in order to try and definitively prove who is hardest.
Chris: Well, they’ve now been in three movies together and De Niro has killed Pacino twice, but Pacino has killed De Niro only once. So canonically, Robert De Niro is tougher.