Carlito's Way has a cult following today, but the perception of it as a minor rehash has mostly stayed intact. And therein lies the problem. Carlito's Way is not a lesser gangster film. It's not a gangster film at all. It bypasses the highs of Scarface to explore the lows of the subsequent hangover, and the result is a stealthy neo-noir classic I never tire of watching.

Yes, it’s a mafia story, and a gangster story, and Brian De Palma had seen a film I did called Indochine, directed by Régis Wargnier. He is a very good friend of Régis Wargnier. And after that, he heard the score, he called me up himself to speak to me, and asked me if I would do this. Of course I said, ‘I think I can do this.’ [laughter] I said yes immediately, of course. He’s an iconic director – unbelievable. So this was an incredible assignment. And I suppose I just delved into all my perceptions and years of watching The Godfather and a million other gangster movies, from James Cagney, White Heat, or whatever. You name it. I was brought up in a world where you only had two or three stations. We had ITV and the BBC. And of course, you saw every film that was from the previous fifty years. So I watched so many of these American gangster pictures, and so I felt as if I had a passion and a feel for it. And it was wonderful to have this opportunity to create a jazz-driven score, really. It was quite a jazzy score. And also a great opportunity to write passionate… it was a passionate love story mixed with this mafia background, and a sort of dilemma. It was a guy who had to make a choice between the old world and the new world, finding love and going off with the bride of his dreams. There was romance and there was excitement and there was tension in it, and there was this jazz feeling. And a wonderful drive. And the action sequence at the end, you know, the locomotive. And this movement at the end, it sort of was [handled] out throughout the score… and ultimately planting some subconscious connections to the chase sequence at the end.

I’ll tell you an interesting story about the chase sequence. The famous Grand Central sequence that he shot. I happened to be in New York to watch, to see what Pacino, comes in, and he holds the dust bin up over his head, and he’s looking up to his girlfriend Gail who is dancing in a loft in New York. And the following day, I went to see that particular sequence. And I watched the ten-minute sequence. And this was presented to him by the editor. He had never seen it before, cut together, and obviously neither had I. And he turned over to me and he said, ‘Bill’ – it was Bill Pankow, the guy’s name – and he said, ‘Bill, go back to…’ and he went back a couple thousand feet or whatever it was, he said, ‘In this scene, I want DA BA DA BA BA! DA BA BA BA BA!’ In terms of the cut. And that was his only note in that ten-minute sequence. And that taught me immediately that this guy was extremely rhythmical and musical. And it turns out his knowledge of classical music and the repertoire was quite formidable, because we’d talk about Tristan and Isolde, we would talk about anything… At one point, I wrote a piece of music, and he said, ‘Patrick, you’re driving my scene. You’re telegraphing my story.’ And he also taught me, I’m embarrassed to say, to look closer to a picture. Just look at, you think you’ve seen all of it, go the extra twenty percent, study every corner of it. And I thought I was doing that. And so I learned a lot from him. What was interesting was, he said, ‘You go finish the score, I’ll see you in four weeks.’ I said, ‘No, we have to have a meeting.’ ‘No, no, I’ll see you in four weeks.’ I said [laughing now], ‘No, no, no, I’m not ready to score all the other sessions without you having heard nothing.’ Okay. That’s the reason I went to New York – I asked to go over to him and play material to him. ‘Okay, if you like.’ And he loved it and that was it! But I still needed that reassurance before I run the sessions… I think it helps clarify the work and that.

Following up Friday's initial tweet about the 360-degree shot, Nedomansky posted five more video clips from the film, each with its own comment, beginning with a "SPLIT DIOPTER ALERT! 5 examples of Brian De Palma's well-embraced visual storytelling technique in Carlito's Way (1993)." He followed that with a clip of the film's shot near the beginning, which moves from the ceiling fluorescents down to Gail, medics, and police, turning upside down and then moving to show Carlito on the stretcher. "I don't even want to know how they did this shot," Nedomansky wrote. "Just want to appreciate its powerful effect..."

Going back to the scene that had the 360-degree shot above, Nedomansky then tweeted a clip foucusing on Carlito's reactions to the conversation around the table. Nedomansky imagined the brief working conversation between De Palma and Burum:

De Palma: Let give Pacino a nice push-in.
DP Stephen H. Burum: I got this.

Nedomansky concluded the series of clips with a beauty: Carlito holding a trash can lid over his head in the rain as he spies Gail with her ballet class through windows across the way. "Carlito tries to reconnect with Gail after 5 years in jail," Nedomansky tweeted. "A beautiful moment as both characters finish the scene with mirrored body poses via a perfect match cut. Subtle and emotional as fuck."

Coming in at number 24 on the list is Carlito's Way, with a summary provided by Matt Zoller Seitz, although we have to question whether the "World Trade Center subway platform and elevator system" actually appear in the film. De Palma had planned to shoot at the World Trade Center PATH Station, but two days prior to the scheduled filming, it was the target of a terrorist bombing. The climax was filmed at Grand Central Station, instead. Here's the Vulture summary from MZS:

The second collaboration between director Brian De Palma and star Al Pacino, this 1990s blockbuster apes 1970s New York urban potboilers while infusing the story with a melancholy gentleness that’s uncharacteristic of the filmmaker and positioning it as a life-affirming answer to their other team-up, 1983’s Scarface. Pacino plays the title character, a Puerto Rican gangster who gets out of prison and tries to reconnect with his young girlfriend (Penelope Ann Miller) and go straight but inevitably gets drawn back into the criminal life via his coked-up, mob-connected lawyer (Sean Penn). The plot mechanics owe a lot to westerns where an old gunfighter wants to settle down but can’t walk ten feet without some punk dragging him into a duel. The final action sequence, which sees Carlito fleeing Italian Mafia goons on foot through the subway system en route to Grand Central station, is the greatest use of the city’s underground transit system ever captured on film, geographically accurate down to the tiniest details of platforms, transfer points, and local-versus-express routes: MTA-map-nerd heaven. Keep an eye out for a voluptuous cameo by the World Trade Center subway platform and elevator system, which would cease to exist eight years after this film’s release.

Matt Zoller Seitz also provides the summary for #69 on the list, God Told Me To:

A repository of 1970s fears of urban decay, random violence, mass murder, UFOs, goverment conspiracies, and cult machinations, this thriller from schlock maestro Larry Cohen (It’s Alive!, Q) starts with a sniper killing 15 random pedestrians with a rifle from his perch in Times Square and gets weirder from there. Tony Lo Bianco stars as Detective Peter Nicholas, who fails to talk the sniper down (“God told me to,” the man says before leaping to his death). He suspects a connection between that tragedy and the random mass murders that follow (including two more mass shootings and a mass stabbing) and eventually uncovers a mystery that feels like an unholy fusion of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Rosemary’s Baby, The Fury, and half the conspiracy thrillers released during the ’70s. New York is presented as a mecca for madness, a nexus of every chaotic and sinister impulse obsessing Americans at that time.

Leguizamo and McFarlane reconnected three years ago at New York Comic Con and started talking about collaborating. Leguizamo was already an Eisner-nominated writer at that point for his graphic novel Ghetto Klown, but McFarlane gave him some tough love on how challenging it is to make a successful comic.

“Just because you are a celebrity does not mean this is just automatically going to work,” McFarlane recalls saying. “You need to deliver a story that people are going to want to read.”

Leguizamo recalls feeling pressure to deliver something McFarlane would approve of.

“It was very sobering talking to Todd. He wasn’t trying to discourage me, he was trying to make me sharper,” says the writer-actor.

As an actor, Leguizamo has worked with acclaimed directors such as Brian De Palma, Spike Lee and Baz Luhrmann and has studied storytelling from them. Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge was a formative experience, with the actor recalling the script was originally a whopping 300 pages. (A two-hour movie generally has a script that runs about 120 pages.)

“We’d read it every Friday, and he kept reducing it until it got to 150. That process became a part of me. I got to write one of the scenes in the movie, which was an incredible opportunity,” recalls Leguizamo. “Brian De Palma, when I did Carlito’s Way, he let me improvise like crazy. There are so many possibilities in a moment. A moment could go anywhere and still be part of the plot and move the plot forward.”

As Vinnie, the son of a mob boss seeking revenge for his father's murder, Siravo is a major part of one of De Palma's most extraordinary and memorable sequences: the subway chase which leads to an escalator shootoout at Grand Central Station.

"Better known to television audiences around the world for his turn as Tony Soprano's ruthless father on The Sopranos," Abid Rahman states in the Hollywood Reporter obituary, "Siravo built up an impressive list of Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional theatres credits and became an integral part of the first national tour of the Tony- and Grammy-award-winning Jersey Boys, playing the part of Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo in over 2,000 performances."

Rahman continues:

Born in Washington D.C. on March 11, 1955, Sivaro attended Stanford University, where he performed for the Stanford Mendicants, an all-male a cappella group. He graduated from Stanford in 1977 with a BA and received his MFA from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Theatre Program in 1980, where he trained under the guidance of Ron Van Lieu, Olympia Dukakis and Nora Dunfee.

Siravo first made his mark acting in theater. His notable Broadway credits include J. T. Rogers' Tony-award-winning play Oslo, Herb Gardner’s Conversations With My Father with Tony Shaloub and Judd Hirsch, the musical The Boys From Syracuse and Craig Lucas' musical The Light In the Piazza.

Off-Broadway he starred in Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest and Michael Develle Winn's Up Against The Wind and in the regional theater he starred in a number of Shakespeare productions including Hamlet, Anthony & Cleopatra and Othello.

In 2006, Siravo was part of the first national tour of the phenomenally successful musical Jersey Boys, based on the career and music of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. He played Genovese family boss Gyp DeCarlo and stayed with the production until 2012, performing in 38 cities.

To a wider audience, Siravo will always be remembered as Johnny "Johnny Boy" Soprano from HBO's critically acclaimed mob drama The Sopranos. Siravo took on the role of DiMeo crime family capo and father of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). In the show, he appeared in flashback and dream sequences in five episodes, making his first appearance in "Down Neck," the seventh episode in season one with his final one in episode 15 of season six titled "Remember When."

Siravo's also starred in FX's Emmy award-winning drama The People V. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, in which he gave a powerful performance as Fred Goldman, the father of the murdered Ron Goldman.

His other television credits include For Life, New Amsterdam, Blue Bloods, The Blacklist, Elementary, In Treatment, Made In Jersey, Dirty Sexy Money, Hack, Third Watch, Law & Order, Witness To The Mob and Cosby.

Siravo made his big-screen debut in Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way in 1993, in which he played Vinnie Taglialucci, the grieving son of a mob boss who seeks revenge on David Kleinfeld (Sean Penn) and Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino). Although his focus was mainly on theater and television, Siravo's film credits include Maid in Manhattan, Shark Tale, playing John Gotti in The Wannabe and most recently The Report, Equity and Motherless Brooklyn.