STARS GONE 45

The combination of Johnny Depp and Al Pacino makes `Donnie Brasco' the best Mafia movie since `Goodfellas'

The Corleones are back - in glorious new 35mm prints. David Thomson celebrates 'The Godfather' epic and pays tribute to America's first family

A gangster movie with a lyrical script, in which Andy Garcia is tormented by his life of crime. A film for the boys, says Adam Mars-Jones: THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD Gary Fleder (18)

Big Bob and little Al. What a pairing. The masters of grunt, fidget and shrug do the Method thing in Heat: one's the good guy, one's the bad guy, but how else can you tell them apart?

YOU WOULD hardly be surprised if, in a movie called Wolf, starring Jack Nicholson, the leading actress had little more to do than stand back and look fearful, or fascinated. But the actress cast in that role is Michelle Pfeiffer - so there is more to be said, as well as stray, warning apprehensions that go unuttered but which linger in our mind, like the calm grief in her smog-laden eyes. Wolf is a silly picture (though it doesn't quite bury an intriguing idea), and Pfeiffer might have regarded it as just a photo-opportunity with a famous co-star and some cool clothes. (Her character also sleeps beneath a Velasquez Infanta - which begins to explain such ancient, experienced eyes. And she snores a little - when did a beautiful actress ever snore?) But she makes so much of the slight role, we want to know more about her character, the subversive loner daughter of a plutocrat publisher.

A scene I've looked at quite frequently is the big argument between the two parents in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part III, in which Diane Keaton tells Al Pacino that she's had abortions. This is going to turn into one of the most powerful moments in the movie. It's a tough argument - it splits the marriage. There's beautiful work by the actors in it: that kind of sudden violence is something Al Pacino excels at. The scene erupts at the end and it's terrifying.

Ferdinando Scarfiotti, production designer: born Porto Recanti, Italy 1941; died Los Angeles 30 April 1994.

Carlito's Way (18) - Director: Brian De Palma (US)

THE TRIAL of Brian De Palma has been long, bitter and public - a show trial of an alleged show-off director. Every sort of expert has taken the stand - critics (film and literary), other journalists, politicians, psychologists, feminists. It's an open and shut case - open for over 20 years, but closed in the minds of most of those trying it. Supporters hail him as a genius; detractors portray him as a monster. His reputation is highest at home in America, and near its nadir in Britain. The most influential postwar film writer, Pauline Kael, set the tone for a generation of rhapsodic American critics. Martin Amis, profiling De Palma in 1984, seemed to conclude that the emperor, like most of his leading ladies, had no clothes.

JACK THE BEAR (Fox Video 15 94mins). Danny De Vito is a horror show host and widower in this coming-of-age Californian Gothic: his son must learn to cope with loss, De Vito must cope with adulthood. The tone is short story sensitive, and there are jarring good vs evil elements - from puppy love to child molestation - yet this lingers in the memory; it has the tart moodiness of a troubled adolescent.

HOWARDS END (Curzon PG 136mins)

Un Coeur en Hiver (12; Camden Plaza, Gate, Lumiere). A romantic triangle set in the music world, and exquisitely acted in Claude Sautet's delicate chamber piece.

Over the last few years, a new genre has been taking shape before our mostly unimpressed but occasionally misty eyes. What to call it, when in a way it's only a twist on a venerable formula? But the twist involves a change in the gender of its primary audience, which is hardly a trivial detail. The new genre is the men's weepie, the tear-jerker that targets testosterone.