Twenty-five years ago, Robert De Niro enjoyed a particularly stellar year that would change his career forever. In November, he reunited with his frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese for Casino, a companion piece of sorts to their 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas. Just a few weeks later, he shared the screen with fellow acting titan Al Pacino for the first time in Heat, Michael Mann’s cops-and-robbers epic.
Yet at the time, this one-two punch wasn’t necessarily regarded as a triumph. Sky-high expectations for a de facto Goodfellas follow-up and a Pacino/De Niro team-up meant that both movies garnered a lot of reviews that were more respectable than ecstatic, and months later these two awards hopefuls received a grand total of one Oscar nomination between them — for Sharon Stone’s career-best performance in Casino.
Criticisms leveled at both movies at the time zeroed in on the crime-picture familiarity that now makes them feel like classics. Some came down especially hard on the idea that Pacino, Pesci, and particularly De Niro were repeating themselves. De Niro had delivered gentler, change-of-pace performances not much earlier in movies like 1990’s Awakenings and 1993’s Mad Dog and Glory, and the close proximity of Heat to Casino wound up calling attention to his characters’ similarities across the two films: Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly described him as “a scowling cipher, a forbidding synthesis of dictator and monk,” then a few weeks later noted that in Heat, “as in Casino, he’s playing an ice-minded humanoid.”