★★★★☆What a decade the Seventies were for Al Pacino. The first two Godfathers, Dog Day Afternoon, Scarecrow, The Panic in Needle Park – and Serpico, which 50 years on is still one of Hollywood’s most wince-inducing explorations of police corruption.
Pacino plays the real-life figure of Frank Serpico, who fought a culture of payoffs and blind eyes in the New York Police Department in the late Sixties and early Seventies before turning whistleblower. He was shot in the face for his trouble – that’s where the film opens – but his bravery led to the establishment of the Knapp Commission, which concluded that the NYPD was systemically corrupt.
Directed by Sidney Lumet, one of the kings of gritty American drama,
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