Scarface

Director: Brian De Palma, Brian De Palma, Brian De Palma

1983 / 170min / 35mm

De Palma’s ultraviolent, ultra-quotable, ultra-colorful, ultra-everything remake of Howard Hawks’s gangster classic is the crass, visually loud flipside to the sober, muted The Godfather, a massively deranged and gleefully disreputable tale of the rise and plunging downfall of a Cuban immigrant turned Miami drug kingpin. Al Pacino throws himself into the title role with the fury of an angry Rottweiler, while Michelle Pfeiffer glowers gorgeously in her breakthrough role as his trophy wife. Featuring cinema’s second most shocking shower scene, a script by Oliver Stone, and a surging soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder, Scarface might just be the film of the Reagan ’80s.