With every viewing, I come to appreciate Brian DePalma's Scarface more and more. Although not perfect, but then again what is perfection anyway?? It helps to compare it with its countless imitations: where most subsequent crime films rush headlong from one bloody gunfight to the next, Scarface takes its time. Its languid, gliding camera has a certain elegance in the way it reveals story points without relying on clunky Dick-and-Jane dialog or overwrought MTV pyrotechnics. A prime example is the infamous scene where Tony Montana attempts to buy two kilos of coke from some Columbians for his boss, Frank Lopez. Watch the way the camera drifts from the Miami Beach hotel room, across a peaceful sun-drenched street, over to the car where Tony's associates are waiting for him, then slowly back up to the bathroom window, where the sound of the idling chainsaw grows louder. Creepy. Insinuating and pure brilliance in cinema. It's comparable to the best work of Hitchcock - a day-lit nightmare where the ordinary becomes sinister. Watch closely as the Columbian dismembers Tony's friend limb by limb. In spite of the scene's reputation, we never actually see what's happening......Like the shower murder in Psycho, all the violence is implied - so strongly, in fact, that DePalma had to fight the MPAA in a well-publicised battle to keep Scarface from receiving an X rating.

I remember seeing this on laserdisc for the first time and it's interesting the way that the improved picture and sound seem to contribute to every aspect of the film. Subtleties in Pacino's largely unsubtle performance become clear. We can better see what he does with his face in those famously shadowy close-ups; the way he registers what he's thinking privately, even as he swaggers with exaggerated bravado. Where once it seemed he was over-acting at times, it is now apparent that he was carefully playing his character's machismo against a darker undercurrent of great hunger - so intense that it defies articulation. Tony Montana's great tragedy is his utter lack of self-knowlege. Beneath the clouds of cordite and testosterone, he is so painfully needy that he will draw everyone around him into a decaying orbit of destruction. He is a criminal, but he is not immoral. He is a black hole of a man, a vacuous human being whose desires eclipse whatever soul that a life of deprivation and decay may have left him. He acts without apology, or even much thought. He's an animal in both the best and worst senses of the word. it is a tragedy that he is killed at the end - but hey, he brings that on himself - after all...he was warned many times....not to go to far....i think the famous words were, "i tell you this one time...dont you f*ck me Tony, dont you ever try to f*ck me"...he clearly overstepped the mark and got his not so nice reward. A masterpiece of cinema. 9.85/10

I find myself enjoying this film when I watch it. Well, perhaps enjoying is a bit of an odd verb when you think of the storyline, its characters, the amount of violence and of course, the f-bomb being dropped about 15,000 times.

I like Pacino in this film. He shows us the violent anger we didn't see in Michael Corleone. We're Michael would say, "Never hate your enemies, it clouds your judgement," Tony Montana's out killing everybody. Now granted, there are moments in his performance...or in the script where you have to laugh. The questioning scene in the beginning of the film is a fine example of this. When asked where he got that scar on his cheek...well, I can't write what he says in the regular version, but I will tell you that on edited version on TNT, it from was "eating pine apple."

There is a great performance from Robert Loggia. He's the only character I truly believed in the film. Frank was a businessman, not a killer. All he wanted was the money. Greed killed him, as it has killed so many people. I enjoyed the direction Loggia went with Frank. It has carried over his recent work and has made Loggia one of Hollywood's must durable supporting actors.

Brian DePalma adds his usual blend of violence, but it seemed that for once, he was trying to make his own film. Not borrowed. No guessing games on who he stole from this time. Although he's blasted for the film's content, it is a new beginning to his career which took off, but it was really "The Untouchables" that made me consider him a serious director.

This movie is great especially the acting of Al Pacino, The storyline was nicely written no other film can compare to this one I also love that its set in 1980's which gives it a unique feeling. Even today this movie is very popular among Teens and Adults, Great Film

Pacino gives an amazing performance that is both comic and tragic in this remake of the 1932 classic about corruption in America.

Brian De Palma updated the original Prohibition story to the era of the Mariel boat-lift and the heavy traffic in drugs that still infest the United States. The film is an uncompromising revelation of humanity's dark side as Pacino's character learns never to underestimate the other guy's greed. He neglects to learn the other important lesson -- never get caught in the vice you are pushing on others.

Pacino's character wants the world and everything in it. That's what he gets. We are reminded to beware of what we wish for.

The film is violent but never makes drug dealing seem glamorous.

Al Pacino does not make Montana into a sympathetic character, but he does make him into somebody we can identify with, in a horrified way, if only because of his perfectly understandable motivations. Wouldn't we all like to be rich and powerful, have desirable sex partners, live in a mansion, be catered to by faithful servants -- and hardly have to work? Well, yeah, now that you mention it. Dealing drugs offers the possibility of such a lifestyle, but it also involves selling your soul.

Montana gets it all and he loses it all. That's predictable. What is original about this movie is the attention it gives to how little Montana enjoys it while he has it. Two scenes are truly pathetic; in one of them, he sits in a nightclub with his blond mistress and his faithful sidekick, and he's so wiped out on cocaine that the only emotions he can really feel are impatience and boredom. In the other one, trying for a desperate transfusion of energy, he plunges his face into a pile of cocaine and inhales as if he were a drowning man.

"Scarface" understands this criminal personality, with its links between laziness and ruthlessness, grandiosity and low self-esteem, pipe dreams and a chronic inability to be happy. It's also an exciting crime picture, in the tradition of the 1932 movie. And, like the "Godfather" movies, it's a gallery of wonderful supporting performances: Steven Bauer as a sidekick, Michelle Pfeiffer as a woman whose need for drugs leads her from one wrong lover to another, Robert Loggia as a mob boss who isn't quite vicious enough, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as Pacino's kid sister who wants the right to self-destruct in the manner of her own choosing.

These are the people Tony Montana deserves in his life, and "Scarface" is a wonderful portrait of a real louse

Ya know when one looks at this Brian DePalma film today, I'm sure there has been allot of criticism about how dated it is. Also, about the violence. When I looked at this film on VHS when I was 20, I thought it was ulta-violent and gritty as well. But I didn't get 'it'.

A few decades go by and man, how I know how much I didn't get in this film!! This is a remake of an excellent film which was done back in the 30's/40's. How can you improve upon a classic? Ya don't. But you tell a tale that is brought up to date through the eyes of the "new immigrants" during the most greed ridden decade, the over indulgent 80's. DePalma, Stone and the gang present an ambitious, disturbing and darn right good film.

Yes....Disco was dying and New Wave/Punk were taking over but these immigrants from Cuba who had to make a new home in Florida couldn't tell the difference. It was exciting, it was what they wanted but how to get it???? To these immigrants, there was only one way to get it in Florida where they were..by having lots of money and to get the money, you had to take over running a drug empire.

Al Pacino was fantastic to me as Tony Montana, the "little train that could". What an amazing way to have your lead character look at America: to fight, kill, steal. lie, cheat all to get -- "the money, the women and the power."

That's what Tony saw as the American dream.

He wanted it, he wanted to live it and in his circle saw nothing wrong with how he went to get it. Tony Montana's command of the English language was heavily saturated with the "f" word but what did you expect, Emily Post's finishing school for him and his co-horts? Look at how they CAME to America, what they knew, what they were exposed to. This is the way Tony and his crew chose to "be all they can be in America." It was all about the power. Tony Montana would and did ANYTHING to achieve it..it all its violent, lying, stealing, crooked, thieving glory.

The part of the film that personified the 1980's to me, is the money laundering. Tony's crew bringing sacks of drug money to the bank. Did those around Tony and his crew care? At the clubs where he spent and drank? Nope. Money was money and with money, you get the power. Tony was living high off the hog. He and his pretty blond American trophy he married played well by Michelle Pfieffer.

After Tony Montana's rise to power, he finds out its really crappy up there. He's riddled with doubt, he's drug addicted, he's paranoid, he's surrounded by those who want to take him on in a bloody take-over, his trophy 80's American blonde drug addicted wife he finds out is a bore, he needs to keep atop of his empire because...he's going down. And down he goes in a horrific violent fashion, but again I ask, what do you expect?

This is the quintessential 1980's film telling you a warped tale of how some misunderstand the American Dream...to obsession. It's violent, bloody, overly so..but it drives the point disturbingly home. Not all Cubans thrown out of Cuba who landed in Florida in the 80's were anything like Tony Montana. Give me a break. But the showing of how miserable the 1980's were with its emphasis on greed and money as the only measures in the USA to "be somebody" and have power took its tool on these poor characters and their lives in America.

Scarface is a 1983 epic crime drama film directed by Brian De Palma, written by Oliver Stone, and starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana. Based on Howard Hawks' original 1932 film of the same name, the film tells the story of a fictional Cuban refugee who comes to Florida in 1980 as a result of the Mariel Boatlift. Montana becomes a gangster against the backdrop of the 1980s cocaine boom. The film chronicles his rise to the top of Miami's criminal underworld and subsequent downfall in tragic Greek fashion.

its an amazing movie, it was great theres nothing bad about it, for older people but oh well, even though it was made in 1980's its still a great action, adventure, killer, movie u could watch it over and over again and not get tired of this movie ever alls i can say is thats its a great movie