The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

Dir: Francis Ford Coppola (2hrs 37mins) (15)

★★★★

Francis Ford Coppola has returned to the cutting room at the age of 81 to re-edit

The

– and redeem a film that was a critical flop on its release in 1990, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. The first two parts of his “great American triptych” have an enduring “grandeur and tragic epic force”, and Coppola always intended the third – shot “on a breakneck deadline” – as an “epilogue”, not a substantial new chapter. Its new title –

– reflects this, and the director has also clarified the plot. Most notably, we’re now plunged straight into the efforts of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) to legitimise the family business, with a $600m deal with the Vatican that only leads him into “still-murkier vales”.

Godfather Part III

Coda

The casting of Coppola’s 18-year-old daughter Sofia – now an Oscar-winning film-maker – in the role of Corleone’s daughter Mary, was widely criticised at the time, said Dave Calhoun in Time Out. Some parts of her performance have been cut, but in any case, I always felt her “awkward, child-adult presence” was “one of the film’s most fascinating elements”. Let’s face it – at only five minutes shorter than the original, this is essentially “the same damn movie”, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. And that’s not a bad thing. The first two films are America’s “national opera” of family, crime, love, loss, power and corruption. And while this can’t match them, it does touch their grandeur, with a final sequence of unsurpassed bravura.

Godfather

In cinemas and available on Apple, Google and Amazon.