Metacritic reviews

Though the story in Carlito’s Way is treated in a fatalistic sense, the moment-to-moment, frame-to-frame experience is anything but rigid and stodgy from over-determination. It sings, dances, punches, slinks, embeds. It moves like the luxurious tracking shots that punctuate the film.

Utterly compelling - Sean Penn is a powerhouse in support - and with a railway station set - piece in which De Palma actually betters what was his previously Untouchable effort.

Penn, with curled hair and wire-rims, makes a brilliant, slippery high-end shyster; his modulated hysteria is amazing. So is Brian De Palma’s direction. Few films actually made in the disco era can match the kinetic allure of this 1993 production, which has a bluesy undertow all its own.

The acting here, by Sean Penn, is a virtuoso tour de force - one of those performances that takes on a life of its own.

With a concluding chase/shoot-out episode that might even make Hitchcock jealous, Carlito's Way is a dandy piece of entertainment. If the story needs a bit more depth and reason, who really cares? There's hardly time to notice.

Carlito’s Way is perfectly okay entertainment, yet this 2-hour-and-21-minute movie never convinced me it wouldn’t have been every bit as good (if not better) as a lean and mean Miami Vice episode.

Below the attention-getting surface, there's no sense of humanity underneath. The day De Palma pulls away the masks from his characters, they'll start to breathe -- and so will his films.

Carlito's Way probably should have been a taut thriller, but choices by DePalma in both presentation and editing have hamstrung it.

About halfway through, the overwhelming fact that the movie is a complete nothing becomes too much to ignore.

There’s a secondhand feel to the way this gangster movie delivers the goods. Carlito’s Way is haunted by a ghost from De Palma and Pacino’s past — Scarface.