Carlito's Way (1993)
crime drama
directed by : Brian De Palma
featuring : Al Pacino - Sean Penn - Penelope Ann Miller - Luis Guzman - John Leguizamo
running time : 2 hours 21 minutes
Carlito's Way is a tale of a former hood trying to escape his former life. Al Pacino is Carlito Brigante, a high-level Puerto Rican drug dealer sprung from a three-decade jail sentence after only five years, thanks to a technicality and his sleazy, cocaine-addled lawyer, Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn). Carlito renounces his previous ways and takes a job as the manager of a club that Kleinfeld has invested in, planning to save enough money so that he can eventually move to the Caribbean. But no sooner is Carlito back on the streets of New York than his old life claws at him in the form of both old partners (Luis Guzman) and vicious up-and-comers (John Leguizamo). Nevertheless, Carlito stays clean and even restarts his relationship with a dancer named Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), until he is finally led astray by Kleinfeld, who manipulates Carlito into participating in the murder of a Mafia don from whom Kleinfeld has stolen a million dollars. At that point, the race is on to see whether Carlito and Gail can escape his world for good. The film is based on two novels about Carlito written by New York State judge Edwin Torres.

By the early '90s, the initial controversy surrounding Brian De Palma' violent remake of Scarface had evaporated and the film had become something of a high-profile cult classic. A re-teaming of the film's director and star (Pacino), Carlito's Way was marketed as its followup and it is, though not necessarily in the way most would expect. While Scarface starred Pacino as a character whose all-encompassing appetite leads him to climb higher and higher in the underworld, in Carlito's Way he plays a world-weary character seeking only to get out. In place of the drug-fueled mania of Tony Montana, Pacino uses silence and knowing looks to convey a miles-deep sadness. It's a masterful performance in a film that has much to recommend it, in particular a handful of deftly-executed set pieces, a tremendous feel for its disco-era setting, and a terrific supporting cast (Guzman, Leguizamo, and Penn). But ultimately it's the elegiac mood of the film that stays longest in the memory, as De Palma and company escalate B-movie material into a meditation on aging and fate. Severely underrated at the time, this is a film that just looks better as the years go by.