New York Times
"...The most stylish and provocative -- and maybe the most vicious -- serious film about the American underworld since [THE GODFATHER]....Vivid and arresting." 12/09/1983 p.C18Variety
"...SCARFACE is a grandiose modern morality play....[The film] possesses an engaging topicality and packs a punch..." 11/30/1983 USA Today
"...Pfeiffer, now as then, steals the show..." 02/05/1993 p.3D Entertainment Weekly
"...[It's] fun to simply enjoy this amazing Al Pacino vehicle for the bloody, politically incorrect, relentlessly macho potboiler that it is..." 05/23/2003 p.29 Sight and Sound
"...Still perhaps De Palma's most genuinely convincing work..." 03/01/2001 p.64 Chicago Sun-Times
"...An exciting crime picture....A gallery of wonderful supporting performances....SCARFACE is a wonderful portrait of a real louse..." 09/19/2003 p.38 Total Film
"...Pacino plays the odious Tony Montana with a dead-on mix of predatory steel and flawed flashiness..." 04/01/2001 p.106 Movieline's Hollywood Life
"...This Brian DePalma butcher block has found a thriving life of its own..." 12/01/2003 p.116 Premiere
"[A] brilliant, bloody Prohibition-era gangster movie..." 12/01/2003 p.13 Ultimate DVD
5 stars out of 5 -- "It's undoubtedly the larger than life quality of the film which pleases many, but young turk Oliver Stone also delivers a potent screenplay..." 12/01/2006 p.202 eFilmCritic.com 9 of 10
This quite simply is both Al Pacino and Brian De Palma's finest hour. It is a gripping tale of a cuban immigrant, Tony Montana (Played by a career best Al Pacino) who kills a cuban political refugee while in an LA camp for cuban immigrants...Criticizing this movie is impossible, because Stone and DePalma pretty much dare people to criticize it. It's all so desperately over the top that it goes beyond scorn or derision - Scarface knows that it's all silly. It's in on the joke. It's an immensely entertaining movie, but don't watch it with your parents.
Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
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. - Roger Ebert
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