Although Carlito's Way in a sense represents the falling motion to Scarface's rising action, it lacks the nervous, overstuffed agitation of Scarface, replacing it with a kind of wistful, elegaic burnout, a paean to uninvolement, to not-doing, or doing other-than. Carlito's Way is more of a piece with The Untouchables, both sweeping historical epics which have the time and space to collect themselves, develop characters, build whole worlds in which to enact tensely clever set-pieces, some of the best of De Palma's career. Carlito's Way and The Untouchables also share a grand, constructed artificiality. They know they are movies, hearkening back to an older-school vibe, when movies had to span the whole of what cinema could do, to offer suspense…

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"Adiós, counselor."

Brian De Palma sets the stage and Al Pacino just walks off, disco blaring. The two are usually only as electrifying as their material, and here, with a sharp, swooning machismo weepie, they both shine as bright as can be. De Palma's set-pieces, whether operatic (the final nightclub/train station chase) or intimate (the playful seduction between Carlito and Gail behind the apartment door) are perfect, and Pacino is given plenty of space to create. A key moment for both artists involves Carlito waiting in the bathroom and taunting the assailants outside after a drug-deal gone bad. De Palma watches from above with a high-angle as Carlito gets up the courage to leave the room, but even before…

A decade after Scarface, Brian De Palma and Al Pacino teamed up for another narrative-driven crime epic. Despite that I find Scarface to be a more satisfying experience, I can safely say that after watching both, Carlito's Way is probably better as an actual "movie". It's a crime-drama that I've always felt never got the credit it deserved, one that I'd even rank up there with Scorsese's best.

Set against the gritty backdrops of 1970s New York, Pacino plays Carlito Brigante, a Puerto Rican former drug-pusher who has just been released back onto the mean streets after doing time. He plans to leave all that shit behind him, but it unfortunately isn't as easy as that as many former associates…

Ten years after they made "Scarface," Al Pacino and director Brian De Palma are back with "Carlito's Way," another large-canvas portrait of a professional criminal. Carlito Brigante, is older and wiser, however, than "Scarface's" Tony Montana, and for a time seems to be luckier.

He's a New Yorker with a Puerto Rican background, a drug dealer who was big in the barrio before he got sent up for 30 years.

We meet him at the legal hearing that will free him after only five years, on a technicality. His lawyer, a flashy lowlife named Kleinfeld (Sean Penn), sits by with a smirk as Carlito expansively addresses the judge and courtroom on the lessons to be learned by his release.

The…