From the wonderful two - part harmony he and the estimable Charles Durning orchestrate in Dog Day Afternoon; to the quiet, cross-cut exchange of existential ethics between Pacino's cop and De Niro's robber in Heat; to the
easy rapport between a mobbed - up nowhere man (Pacino) and Johnny Depp's Donnie Brasco, a pretender losing himself in his own fiction; to the subtle rhythms of conversational foreplay — in a car
parked in the rain — between Pacino and Russell Crowe in The Insider, you
appreciate how this actor somehow manages to share without giving ground.