Winner of multiple Oscars, including for Best Picture, The Godfather Part II is the rare sequel that stands as an equal to its predecessor, and offers a staggeringly powerful multi-generational portrait of immigrant life in 20th-century America.

Francis Ford Coppola’s continuing saga of the Corleone family picks up several years after the original Godfather left off, with Michael (Al Pacino) having expanded the criminal empire out West while weighing the possibility of doing business in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Coppola reunites with original novelist Mario Puzo to craft a storytelling structure that, despite many emulators, remains among the most effective in cinema history, interweaving Michael’s violent Machiavellian maneuvers with flashbacks to his father Don Vito (Robert De Niro, in an Academy Award-winning performance) progressing from Sicily to Little Italy, where he starts a family and turns to crime.