Word: serpico
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Actually, a fourth if you count Wesley Snipes, who has a smaller but pivotal part as a lusciously smooth drug dealer named Cassanova. With all these balls in the air, the viewer gets impatient for them to come together. The aim is clearly epic - this film aspires to be Serpico, New Jack City and Training Day all rolled into one - but by the time the dots do connect, it less a climax than a relief...
...Frank Serpico, the corruption-fighting officer portrayed by Al Pacino in the 1973 movie, is the only pure whistle-blower you've seen. In my experience he was the only person who did this out of genuinely altruistic motives. (Read TIME's 1971 article about Serpico...
...this for New York in the mid-'70s: from its desperate blight emerged some pretty sharp movies. Back then, children, Hollywood was actually interested in reflecting contemporary society, and this poster child for urban dystopia provided the perfect setting. A raft of films - Serpico, Death Wish, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver - navigated that stinky Styx with the expertise of a champion white-water rafter. A lesser but still pertinent entry was The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which starred Robert Shaw as the criminal mastermind and Walter Matthau as the transit detective trying to talk...
...newly trained police from backsliding into old practices, and protecting them from corrupt officials who are threatened by clean cops. They compare Bala Beluk to 1970s New York City, with its toxic mix of gang warfare, corruption, organized crime and drug commerce. Khodaydad, they say, is an Afghan Frank Serpico, the cop who exposed systematic and widespread corruption within the city's police ranks, and was shot by heroin dealers in what was thought to have been a hit organized by corrupt colleagues. Khodaydad is the only non-commissioned officer in Afghanistan to have risen to the rank of police...
...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 - with De Niro running a heist...