As the actor turns 86, we rate his greatest screen performances and ask which Godfather was the best of the trilogy

With greased-back hair, dainty spectacles and bristly chops, Pacino is a former Little League baseball coach turned locksmith. But – symbolism alert! – who holds the key to his clenched heart? One scene gives good cringe: over a would-be romantic dinner with a bank teller (Holly Hunter), he starts reminiscing about his great lost love, oblivious to his date’s escalating indignation.

The latest entry in our series of writers picking their most rewatched comfort films is a nostalgic trip back to 1995

I meet up at least once a year with a group of university friends. We pick a city, descend on it and then leave 48 hours later, often a little worse for wear. I would say about 60% of all communication on these trips is quotes from Michael Mann’s 1995 heist thriller, Heat. Screaming like Al Pacino’s coked-up Los Angeles police detective Vincent Hanna or calmly saying “I have a woman” like Robert De Niro’s robotic master thief Neil McCauley if any of my friends ask me about my wife.

The comedian and film-maker Stanley Sievers did a skit about a guy whose life is destroyed because his whole personality is the film Heat. I laughed along with that awkwardly, while considering just how many times I said “the action is the juice” the last time I met up with my friends.

As his epic crime thriller Heat turns 30, the director talks about pairing acting legends, his thoughts on AI and what’s happening with Heat 2

Hannibal Lecter’s first movie appearance was in 1986’s Manhunter, starring Brian Cox. It took director and writer Michael Mann just five weeks to adapt Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon for the screen.

But when it came to adapting his own work – Heat 2, co-authored with Meg Gardiner as both a prequel and sequel to his 1995 film Heat – Mann discovered the pain of self-editing. “I thought OK, 10 weeks, 12 weeks,” he reflects in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles. “Instead, it took like 10 months and it was arduous because I wanted the same effect as the novel, which required recombining events to fit within a two-and-a-half-hour timeframe. That selection became agonising to say the least.”

Al Pacino and Robert De Niro’s dueling performances add an extra punch to the 1995 masterpiece which is both action-heavy and deeply tragic

Consider the hype leading into Heat when it hit theatres 30 years ago today. Here was Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, two legends the movie’s trailers flexed by their rhyming last names only, both masters of their craft who, much like their characters, had been watching each other from a distance (maybe competitively, maybe with respect and admiration), sharing the screen for the very first time. The pent-up anticipation was built right into the narrative, which patiently delays the onscreen face-off between Pacino’s dogged homicide detective Vincent Hanna and De Niro’s career criminal Neil McCauley for almost 90 textured and intense minutes.

Imagine the surprise then, and the comic relief, when the moment finally arrives, and these two opposing forces collide (as the trailers would say) … for a warm and exceptionally civil cup of coffee.