A Most Violent Year is, in many ways, a creative departure for director J.C. Chandor, whose previous films Margin Call and All Is Lost focused on big-business scheming and man-against-nature conflict, respectively. His latest is a 1981 period piece about a heating-oil bigwig (Oscar Isaac) looking to expand his company while steering clear of his industry's less-savory elements, and from its costume design and hairstyles to its cinematography and crime narrative, it owes a profound debt to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy. That, in turn, places A Most Violent Year in notable company, as Coppola's mafia classics have cast a long shadow on American cinema—including, most recently, James Gray's The Immigrant, whose aesthetics (and 1920s setting) more than faintly recall The Godfather Part II. In honor of The Godfather's illustrious legacy and the wide release of A Most Violent Year this weekend, we present the 10 best works inspired by Coppola's mob masterpieces.

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Ever since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Sergio Leone's final film has been an amorphous creation, thanks to multiple edits and extended cuts that have sought to replicate the revered Italian director's original, true artistic preferences. Regardless of its many iterations, however, Leone's swan song—about a gang of kids in 1920s New York, and the strains that eventually come between them—channels The Godfather not only via Robert De Niro's central performance, but via its epic scale, a narrative rooted in ideas about family and loyalty, and its hauntingly nostalgic evocation of early 20th-century Manhattan, a hardscrabble place of hustlers, beauties, and bountiful opportunities of an extralegal sort.

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While The Immigrant recalls The Godfather Part II, it's not the first time director James Gray has taken inspiration from Coppola's films, as evidenced by The Yards, his superb 2000 drama about a man (Mark Wahlberg) who becomes mired in New York City's corrupt transit system contract business. Shot in rich dark-mahogany hues that envelop its characters, and featuring a supporting turn from Sonny Corleone himself, James Caan, Gray's sophomore directorial outing is a film of luxurious style and ominous plotting that doesn't mimic The Godfather in any one respect so much as subtly channel its intertwined relationship between American criminality, business, government, and family.

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Brian De Palma's direct source material for Scarface was Howard Hawks's 1932 original of the same name. Yet by casting Al Pacino as the larger-than-life Tony Montana, a ruthlessly single-minded Cuban refugee driven to conquer Miami's drug trade, as well as by positioning his material as a commentary on the American Dream and the immigrant experience, De Palma more than faintly follows in the footsteps of Coppola. In Pacino's swaggering, sexualized, sinister performance, Scarface presents a flipped image of Michael Corleone.

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Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate was, for decades, fingered as the preeminent reason for the end of American cinema's 1970s heyday—in large part because, thanks to an out-of-control production, it was a colossal box-office bomb that by and large put its studio (United Artists) out of business. While its reputation may never be fully repaired, Cimino's film, about men who come to the aid of European immigrants battling land barons in 1890 Wyoming, remains a far more worthy effort than it's given credit for. Boasting an idiosyncratic vision of the country's turn-of-the-century schisms, its sprawling scope and creative daring are deeply indebted to Coppola's Godfathers.

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Mean Streets was something like the low-key alternative to The Godfather, but Scorsese went big and bold for Goodfellas. An adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi's book, Scorsese's film is like his own personal rendition of The Godfather, charting the rise and fall of a New York gangster (Ray Liotta) alongside his adopted "family." Both glorifying and damning its underworld milieu and its inhabitants, it's not just a descendant of the Godfather, but thanks in part to unforgettable performances from Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, it's also arguably the only other mob film that can stand toe-to-toe with it.

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Released the same year as Goodfellas, King of New York proves a scintillating portrait of Manhattan criminality focused on its own Godfather, Christopher Walken's drug kingpin Frank White. Charting White's ascent to the top of his profession, and efforts to stay there despite trouble from both rival gangs and the police, Abel Ferrara's film follows the familiar Godfather formula. Yet this underrated gem still boasts its own unique identity, with a career-best performance from Walken (oozing malevolent severity and cunning charm) and a careful balance between opulence and vicious ugliness.

David Chase's acclaimed HBO series remains, to some degree, the definitive post-Godfather mob work, one that actively shouts out to its predecessor (especially in a season-two episode in which Tony and company try to watch the sequel on a stolen DVD player) while expanding, and redefining, its portrait of family and "The Family." Charting its New Jersey mob clan with emotional and psychological incisiveness and dramatic intricacy over the course of six seasons, all of them bolstered by a lead performance by James Gandolfini of titanic heft and nuance, Chase's series remains the most obvious—and perhaps most deserving—heir to The Godfather's throne.

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Goodfellas may be Martin Scorsese's finest take on the mafia, but Casino takes an even grander look at organized crime and the way that it unavoidably and disastrously becomes tangled up in everyday life, through the prism of Las Vegas. Based, like Goodfellas, on a non-fiction book by Nicholas Pileggi, and similarly starring Robert De Niro, Scorsese's film takes a wide-ranging look at the mafia's control of Nevada's gaming industry in the late '70s and early '80s, seguing between back rooms where money is counted to the ostentatious parlors of dapper crooks with a fluidity that's equally sensual and scary.

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AMC's critically adored series, about a chemistry teacher who learns he has cancer and responds by becoming a crystal meth cook, doesn't boast any superficial similarities to The Godfather. Yet in its depiction of Walter White's (Bryan Cranston) journey from lowly nobody to gifted drug chef to terrifying criminal tyrant, Vince Gilligan's show follows the general trajectory—and embraces the pessimistic spirit—of Coppola's first two Godfather films, in which an unlikely man is seduced, and then hopelessly corrupted, by the allure of power.

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In which Marlon Brando makes a spoof you can't refuse...

Nick Schager Nick Schager is a NYC-area film critic and culture writer with twenty years of professional experience writing about all the movies you love, and countless others that you don’t.

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