BRIAN DE PALMA IN 1993: "I CAN'T MAKE A BETTER PICTURE THAN THIS"
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Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way was released in theaters 30 years ago today, on November 12, 1993. In the Noah Baumbach/Jake Paltrow doc De Palma, De Palma recalls watching the film at the Berlin Film Festival (where the film screened in February of 1994) and thinking to himself, "I can’t make a better picture than this." At the end of the decade, Cahiers du cinéma chose Carlito's Way as one of the three best films of the 1990s. Writing for Reverse Shot in 2006, Matt Zoller Seitz, who provides an excellent, insightful commentary track on Arrow's recent 4K UHD Blu-ray edition of the film, begins, "Everything about Carlito’s Way (1993) is improbable, starting with the fact that it’s a masterpiece."
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..."
Updated: Sunday, November 12, 2023 8:59 PM CST
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