In The Pocket Essential Brian De Palma (2000), John Ashbrook writes about Carlito's Way, "This is De Palma's first film noir. Essentially, the noir protagonist is a character with too much past and not enough future. Redemption is only achievable with death, because only with the full payment of all outstanding debts can the books be cleared. In essence, Carlito is dead before the film begins. As he tells Kleinfeld, 'I was dead and buried and you dug me up!' Consequently, he is now living on borrowed time. He has been given a chance to undo some of the evils of his life, but he fails. His time is wasted."

As Gail says while looking at Carlito in the mirror, "I know how this dream ends, Charlie..."

Well before it turned 30, Carlito’s Way was already an anniversary picture: A reunion between Pacino, De Palma, producer Martin Bregman and Universal Pictures, almost exactly a decade after they all worked together on Scarface. (The concept of Pacino doing a Latino accent was allowed to tag along too, apparently.) Scarface’s reputation grew in stature since its respectable, unremarkable box office performance in 1983, as it became a gangster classic, an iconic Pacino vehicle and the inspiration for a number of high-profile rappers. Carlito’s Way is also probably better-regarded now than it was at the time of its original release, but though it did inspire a later direct-to-DVD prequel indicating some youth-market interest, it hasn’t reached Scarface heights of imitation, homage or (despite that great silhouette) dorm-room poster ubiquity. But it’s the better film of the two – maybe even De Palma’s best overall. The director himself seems to think so: “I can’t make a better picture than this,” he recalls thinking to himself while rewatching the movie a few months after it debuted to middling business in the U.S. (See the wonderful documentary De Palma for a candid play-by-play of this and all of his other movies.)

At the time, though, Carlito’s Way was oddly received as an awards-season also-ran, on the heels of Pacino’s recent Oscar win for Scent of a Woman, just about six months earlier. That career context provides – whether intentional or not – De Palma’s smaller-than-usual dose of meta-movie playfulness. Early in the film, Pacino’s Carlito gets a new lease on life when an evidence-tampering technicality springs him from a 30-year prison sentence after only five years. He then insists on addressing the courtroom, talking about how he’s been vindicated by the law, with a hamminess not too far removed from his climactic Scent of a Woman grandstanding. As if to point out the artifice of this performance, the visibly irritated judge tells him to cut it out: “You’re not accepting an award,” he says, though the last time much of the audience had seen Pacino, he was doing just that. Carlito is undeterred and continues his speech.

If that’s an in-joke, it’s an outlier. Apart from one other seeming wink at the audience, when another character informs Carlito that he could pass for Italian (some might say more readily than he could pass for Puerto Rican or Cuban!), the movie finds both Pacino and De Palma in a more reflective mood. Carlito really does want to use his second chance to go straight, earn enough money to buy into a car-rental business a friend runs in the Bahamas, and leave 1970s New York City behind. It turns out that his ticket out of prison is also his ticket back into the life he no longer wants: His lawyer Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn) gets him a job running a club, but then eventually Dave needs a big favor, and the movie’s final 45 minutes kick into gear with sweaty, inexorably mounting tension.

If the movie often avoids the operatic grandeur of Scarface — no “World Is Yours” blimp, no coke mountain, no opulent bubble bath – Carlito’s Way also feels less constrained by its own story. “Constrained” might seem like an odd descriptor for a movie as sprawling as Scarface, but once Tony Montana scraps his way to a place in the drug trade, the less overt desperation slackens the movie, which turns repetitive before its big memorable finale. (Michelle Pfeiffer’s Elvira, Tony’s wife, memorably complains about both his obsession with money and his default “fuck”-laden mode of expression, as if to anticipate complaints about the movie itself.) In the earlier film, De Palma doesn’t always seem especially fascinated by the ins and outs of criminal activity (certainly not with the hopped-up attention of his pal Martin Scorsese), maybe because there isn’t an explicit voyeur figure whose point of view he can readily identify with.

Carlito, on the other hand, is a quieter, more observant character, narrating his own story with a weariness Pacino would tease out further in future roles. Also: Isn’t a guy attempting to bluff his way out of a tight corner, as in that early shoot-out, actually more compelling than the guy who, waiting for attackers behind a door and hollering threats, actually does have a gigantic-ass loaded machine gun at his disposal? The beginning of that Carlito’s Way sequence, where Carlito notices that something is amiss when his young cousin drags him along on a money drop, generates its suspense from the way De Palma makes his camera an extension of Pacino’s subtle wariness. Similarly, an extended chase sequence late in the film that moves from a subway car to Grand Central Station, delays its carnage until the very end; much of it involves watching Pacino run, hide and think on his feet, in a series of long takes that don’t flinch away from the walls closing in on him.

Elsewhere in the film, there are moments where the star turns up his volume knob, going from Pacino to PACINO, but like that courtroom scene and that big trailer line, they tend to be instances of Carlito performing toward his (legitimate) tough-guy image. When they’re not – when he’s arguing with Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), the ex-girlfriend he looks up post-incarceration, or confronting Penn’s maddening Kleinfeld – the fireworks are chased with a sense of palpable despair. De Palma seems to key into that contrast between an ex-gangster’s street-level reputation and private doubts, and the setpiece scrapes Carlito gets into feel more dangerous as a result. De Palma can still direct the hell out of a juicy stalking scene – Kleinfeld has a miniature doozy after the mob realizes he’s ripped them off and killed a made guy – without relying on the addictive dream logic of his more id-like, movie-drunk thrillers.

If that occasionally leaves Carlito’s Way moving at a leisurely pace compared to the spring-loaded craziness of Body Double or Dressed to Kill, well, it’s still 20-something minutes shorter than Scarface, and a lot more soulful. Typically when De Palma returns to certain motifs, they crackle with knowing wit. (I recall, as I often do, the satisfied laughter of a crowd at New York Film Festival beholding Passion when someone brings up the idea of identical twins, as if to say: Finally!) Carlito’s Way has plenty of familiar bits: The questionable loyalty to an unstable friend who the hero “owes,” a one-last-job-then-I’m-out proposition, the doomed romanticism of the reformed criminal who can’t fully extricate himself from that life. Yet the movie feels genuinely poignant, even – or especially – when it feels like it’s echoing Scarface: The wall-sized images of paradise seen in the earlier film are shrunk down to a little subway ad that captures Carlito’s attention in his final moments. Though Carlito’s Way doesn’t need Scarface to work as a piece of top-notch entertainment, it does feel grander and more accomplished in that better-loved movie’s shadow. De Palma’s masterful flourishes are also, in the end, easing us out of the stylish fugue created by larger-than-life images of gangsters. Tony Montana goes out in a blaze of glory – he dies big time. Carlito Brigante only wants to slip away.

Join us for a rare Q&A will Paul Williams, moderated by Jesse Kowalski, Chief Curator, who will speak with Paul Williams alongside clips of his roles in movies, television series, and concerts from the 1960s to today. Film clips include his performances in Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), The Muppet Movie (1979), and Baby Driver (2017). Williams will also be asked about his guest-starring roles on The Odd Couple (1974), The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteriesand The Brady Bunch Variety Hour (1977), Fantasy Island (1981), Community (2014), and a special appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In addition, we will show rare clips of the Carpenters, Elvis Presley, the cast of Ishtar (1987), and others singing his memorable songs. The audience is encouraged to take part in the Q&A.

“I’ve always looked to directors over actors for personal style,” says Hagop Kourounian, who operates the popular Instagram account @directorfits, on which he chronicles the fashion highlights of auteurs past and present. Some recent favorites of his include the look Justine Triet wore while accepting the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, “this bulky, double-breasted blazer, and hardly any makeup except for red lipstick. She just looked really elegant, I thought.” And at the Telluride Film Festival, “Wim Wenders had this insane goth ninja look, with this big black fedora on.” Wenders, Kourounian has found, often breaks out pieces like the Adidas Y-3 Qasa, “which is a shoe that was popular maybe eight or nine years ago. It’s kind of weird to see it back now. I’m sure he just pulled it out of a closet somewhere.”

That’s one of the exciting things about following directors’ style: They don’t necessarily opt for the most on-trend, au courant piece. They’re shopping their closets, and their archives run deep. Directors are also dressing for a physical job, so they favor function: for every Sam Raimi in his impeccable suits, you’ll see a Brian De Palma in safari wear, or Tony Scott in a fishing vest crammed with filmmaking gear. (“That vest was originally designed for [storing] bait and tackle. Now, it’s being used in a totally different work setting, but it still is purposeful,” says Kourounian. “That’s a thing of beauty, in my opinion.”)

The account has also tracked the way some directors go method with their on-set fashion, like Stanley Kubrick wearing a Vietnam-era army jacket for Full Metal Jacket. Greta Gerwig favors boiler suits, directing Barbie in the garment, including a bubblegum-pink version from Pistola. For the prom scene in Lady Bird, she wore a prom dress, just like the cast members. “She said she was trying to do a little bit of cosplay to get her actors in the spirit,” Kourounian explains. “She was one of them in that moment.”

The inspiration goes both ways, with directors’ aesthetics spilling over into their characters’ wardrobes at times. Kourounian notes that Bill Murray’s character in The Royal Tenenbaums “is dressed identically to Wes Anderson in that era, down to the John Lennon-style circular glasses,” and that even the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox features a main character in one of Anderson’s signature suits. Sofia Coppola falls into this category, too: “There’s this amazing photo of her and Rashida Jones on the set of On the Rocks: both of them are wearing the same identical green work pants, and they’re hiked up in the same way.”

The visual precision directors bring to every part of their onscreen work is often reflected in their wardrobes as well. “Directors, especially auteurs, are such creative, world-building people who have all-encompassing visions. There’s no way what they’re wearing wasn’t premeditated and meticulously thought-out.” Paul Schrader is a frequently featured fit god on the account. “It’s not like he’s just wearing something just to wear it, or because it’s popular. It’s almost like a costume designer trying to build an outfit for a character. You can understand a lot about who he is through this very buttoned-up uniform he puts on.”

Asked about the directors he thinks are slept-on style-wise, Kourounian cites De Palma, whose aesthetic feels inspired by a previous generation of filmmakers, “like a John Ford, John Huston kind of vibe. I guess even your favorite director has a favorite director.” A more obscure style icon is sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman, who sports what he calls “these very chic, Old Hollywood-ish looks.”

Hi, Mom! (1970), was De Palma’s fourth feature, yet I’d argue it was the first to showcase his shrewd ambivalence toward the construction of politically and culturally charged iconography. Not least among these images is the recognizable visage of the film’s then relatively unknown star: Robert DeNiro.

Hi, Mom! was the third collaboration between filmmaker and actor (17 years would elapse before they reunited for the comparatively slicker prestige picture The Untouchables [1987]). Indeed, De Palma was the first American to direct DeNiro in a movie after two uncredited cameos in a pair of French auteur Marcel Carne’s films. Their second feature (the first to receive a theatrical release), was Greetings (1968), a hangout movie akin to a sleazier version of Fellini’s I Vitelloni (1953), where three friends listlessly wander New York City avoiding conscription into the Vietnam War. This film marked the first appearance of DeNiro’s character Jon Rubin, who he’d reprise in Hi, Mom!. In the earlier film, he works in a bookstore and goads an attractive customer into shooting a short film whose voyeuristic perversion is hardly elided. By the film’s end, we see Rubin tromping through Vietnam, confronting a suspected female Vietcong fighter, and ordering her to remove her clothes in front of a war correspondent’s cameraman.

While too lackadaisical for its own good, Greetings does pack a bitter punch in not only linking popular media with patriarchal imperialism but also ruthlessly identifying how such an ideological incursion is made possible by performativity. Rubin’s sharp commands are those of a soldier and film director, both roles the man can mimic without a shred of conviction beyond his own narcissism. De Niro’s chameleonic assumption of archetypes as armor makes him the protean De Palma protagonist in a corpus riddled with men (and in some cases, women) whose external appearances, and their social roles by proxy, are transformed by choice or force vis-à-vis media apparatuses.

De Palma wisely elevated Rubin to a leading role for the sequel, and Hi, Mom! thrives from De Niro’s deeper entrenchment into performativity, commensurate with the film’s sociopolitical ferocity. Back in the United States, Rubin has settled in a dilapidated apartment whose major draw is the view it provides into apartment windows across the street. He hatches a prurient scheme to initially film his neighbors before opting to woo one of them (Jennifer Salt) into unknowingly participating in a sex reel that he’ll sell to a porno producer (the reliably unsavory Allen Garfield, reprising his part in Greetings).

Rubin’s moral repugnancy is made queasier by DeNiro’s impish buffoonery. The scant pleasure afforded by watching his machinations fall apart is offset by how De Palma foregrounds this anti-hero’s perspective, right from the opening POV tracking shots of Rubin interacting with his apartment’s cantankerous landlord (another character actor giant, Charles Durning). I’d contend Rubin isn’t a surrogate for the audience but for De Palma, who weaponizes his repressed scopophilia into self-incrimination. Yet DeNiro’s presence contrasts with other De Palma-esque cuckolds and patsies, partially due to the foresight of the former’s cinematic legacy. Watching him play a bespectacled “nice guy” over dinner with his neighbor and prey, it’s impossible to neglect other predatory De Niro characters in his work with Martin Scorsese, up to his most recent turn in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) as the avuncular capitalist casually overseeing the systemic slaughter of the Osage community.

There’s a reflexive quality to De Niro’s performances in the Scorsese and De Palma pictures, which is largely lacking in his mostly execrable output in the new millennium. It’s telling, for example, that the most quoted line of De Niro’s career has been spoofed so often that revisiting Travis Bickle’s ad-libbed monologue is genuinely frightening. In an age where the Internet has enabled incels to indulge and promote their misogynist narcissism, Bickle’s corrosive form of self-actualization is only six degrees of separation from Rupert Pupkin. Jon Rubin prefigures those troubled men as a uniquely disquieting fusion of clown and terrorist.

That latter title is horrifically realized after Rubin takes the part of a cop in a radical activist group’s interactive theatrical production, Be Black, Baby!. The kernel of Rubin’s creative process we glean is his rehearsing in front of a mop before he disappears from the film for a surprisingly lengthy period. Meanwhile, we’re thrust into a performance of the play that immerses and subjects its affluent, white audience to mounting shows of degradation and violence. Filmed on a handheld Arriflex, the Be Black, Baby! segment of Hi, Mom! has been justly praised as one of De Palma’s supreme accomplishments for its visceral (and provocatively political) intertwining of reality with artifice. When Rubin reappears, he viciously beats the patrons painted in blackface, his presence an affirmation of systemic brutality turned against its beneficiaries.

The vicious irony of the piece is subsequently lost on the audience as they exit the warehouse, showering the violable pyrotechnics with bourgeois kudos. It isn’t a stretch to link this disengagement with a depoliticized view of a medium subsumed within a label of “content.” De Niro and De Palma realize a precarious dynamic of separating the real from the fictive through to the film’s climax, where Rubin assumes a dual identity as a middle-class husband and covert operative for the organization. The motivation of his final, destructive act bleakly ties into the film’s title, but this salutary punchline is amplified by how its deliverer modifies his message to the medium. It’s a prophetic vision of myopic image-making that anticipates the echo chambers of social media, where everyone can be a star if they know how and when to wield a camera. Who would think that, at the ground zero of our nightmarish cultural present, we’d find standing there Brian De Palma and Robert De Niro?

Back in July, "An Experience With Al Pacino (Scarface 40th Anniversary) (MIAMI)" was announced for Saturday, December 9. It is unclear if that event is still happening - clicking on the "get tickets" button leads to a page that says, "This event is currently unavailable."

The Phantom of the Opera has inspired dozens of imitations, riffs, and reimaginings over the decades, but the best is, without question (sorry, Phantom of the Megaplex stans), Brian De Palma’s horror-comedy rock musical about a gifted songwriter forced by a deranged record executive to haunt a concert hall. William Finley is magnificent in the title role, Paul Williams is deliciously evil as Swan, and, of course, don’t forget Gerrit Graham as everyone’s favorite trend-chasing rock star, Beef. Made for the age of glam rock and concept albums, it’s as fun to watch now as it was back then, and you’ll have the songs in your head for days.

In Carrie, Brian De Palma flaunts his virtuosity as a filmmaker (is there a passage in ’70s Hollywood as elegant as Carrie’s long, slow walk to the stage, culminating in the fall of the blood bucket, at which point the somnolent slowness goes from lovely to agonizing?) as much as he displays his bone-aching empathy for the tragic Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). Adapting Stephen King’s debut novel at the advent of King’s reign in the book world and in Hollywood, on his way to becoming the most pervasive presence in pop-culture of the 1980s (it was his endorsement that helped bring Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead success), De Palma creates a harmonious marriage of formal bombast and tender humanity, capturing the panic spread by the unusual and the pain of the daily banalities of being a teenage girl in America.

“Virtuosity” and “humanity” also describe Piper Laurie’s staggering performance as Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, a fervid acolyte of some notion of Christ whose beliefs and implementation of punishment for minute sins are unorthodox, but she believes with all her heart. Her faith remains unwavering. The film’s cast is an eclectic array of characters with quirks and personalities, some modest and “realistic” (Amy Irving’s Sue, afflicted with guilt) and some decidedly villainous (Allen’s queen bitch and her thuggish, beer-swilling, swine-killing boyfriend played by John Travolta) in that distinct, classic way of the pre-slasher horror picture, a genre founded upon fear of the strange (Baudelaire’s affinity for the anomalous is very much relevant here).

Laurie’s God-fearing matriarch is outlandish, realized with some capital-A acting at the apogee of New Hollywood histrionics and opposite Spacek’s very internalized, kind-and-loving performance, emotions conveyed in meek terseness and downward-gazing eyes. With hair the color of sin sticking out all frizzy and unkempt, her makeup-less face wide in divine expression as she spreads the word of God translated into her own sui generis piousness, Laurie’s return to Hollywood after a 15-year absence (following her acclaimed performance in 1961’s The Hustler) is indelible and incendiary. Her presence in the film is exaggerated, a performance with an exclamation point, yet still steeped in humanity, strangled by the trauma of corrupted innocence and the desperation to make sense of one’s life. She had a kid and it ruined hers; you hear such stories all the time, hear the sanctimony of parents telling teens to abstain because the last thing they want is a kid too young.

When Margaret hurls her daughter into the closet for blaspheming, it’s not hatred of her daughter that has her quaking, but hatred of herself for birthing spawn that possesses the power of the Devil.