Word: brandos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, twin heirs to Marlon Brando's Method mantle, play New York City detectives on the trail of a cop who's a serial killer. The first movie in which the stars share prime screen time could have been an event--if it had happened 30 or 20 or even 10 years ago. Not now, not here. Instead of a World Series of acting, we get a wan Old Timers' Game...
...Since the early '70s the two have dominated dramatic acting in films; when Brando abdicated, they seized the crown. Just the pictures De Niro made with Martin Scorsese would constitute a dream career for any almost other performer: Mean Streets in 1973, then Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas. Same with Pacino's "S" movies: Serpico and Scarecrow in '73, followed by Scarface, Sea of Love, Scent of a Woman. De Niro and Pacino played father and son in The Godfather Part II but never shared a scene. In the 1995 Heat they spent nearly three hours in the same movie...
...Smith, whose career spanned a vigorous half-century and who's still around at 86, gave Dustin Hoffman his simian, centenarian face in Little Big Man, puffed Brando's cheeks in The Godfatherand turned 13-year-old Linda Blair into a puking, head-swiveling demon in The Exorcist. Imagine any of these films without Pierce's or Smith's contributions, and your mindscreen plays a much more ordinary movie. No sleepless night for the kids, either...
...Indy's son by Marion. (Why is he called Mutt? Presumably because, as we learned at the end of The Last Crusade, Indiana was the name of the Jones family dog; Mutt's just extending the breed.) He enters on a motorcycle, in the leather-jacket regalia Marlon Brando sported in The Wild One, and soon displays some of the athletic skills he must have inherited from his absent dad. Whether the smooth-visaged LaBeouf can grow into Ford's craggy machismo - or even whether he can top the teen Indys that have been played by River Phoenix...
Heston, who died April 5 at 84, was unique among Hollywood stars. Of no other actor could you say, He was born to play Moses, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Michelangelo. At the very moment Marlon Brando was freeing film-acting from good manners, Heston proved there was thrilling life in the endangered tradition of speaking well and looking great. And when he wasn't the movies' avatar of antique glory, he was our emissary to the future: the last man on earth in two dystopian science-fiction films, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. Heston was the alpha...