Reunited for the first time since Hispanic gangster epic Scarface a decade ago, Brian De Palma directs Al Pacino as former Puerto Rican hardman Carlito Brigante, freshly released in 1975 from a thirty-five year stretch on a technicality. Back on the streets - high on going straight and buying into a Bahamas car rental - he pockets the cash from a bungled drug deal he witnesses and takes to managing of a club in Spanish Harlem.

But to the street Brigante is a legend and the inevitable burden sucks him right back in, not least when corrupt lawyer Kleinfeld (Sean Penn) wants Carlito's help springing a mob godfather from the New York harbour.

David (Jurassic Park) Koepp's script (from two Edwin Torres novels) offers scope enough for a haggard Pacino to savour life as a man shamed by the excesses of the his past. And superb as he is (far more so than the now rather wooden Scarface), it's the slime-lawyer - balding bubble perm, Lennon glasses and terminally hip suit - that steals the picture from the older man; thankfully not making good Penn's threat to give up performing for life behind the camera. Villainy support, from the likes of a sweaty Viggo Mortensen and unctuous John Leguizamo, is first-rate.

All plain sailing it isn't though, and as well as Patrick Doyle's occasionally over-insistent score (the 70s disco on the other hand is glorious), Penelope Ann Miller's dancer love interest is formulaic and trite. Most crucially, at two and a half hours, and despite well sustained pacing, the film comes out over-long.

Most surprising, given the director's demonstrated fondness for violent, referential (often self-referential) cinema, De Palma is remarkably restrained in here (no chainsaws or grenade-launchers), only twice letting his infamous cinematic gusto off the leash: he screws the tension of an early pool room drug-deal until the pips squeak; and the film pays-off in a homage to his own The Untouchables with an extended chase through the New York subway and magnificently choreographed shoot-out on a Grand Central Station elevator that, for sheer cinematic pizzazz, will be hard to beat.

And for once the flashback structure that so did for the director's Casualties of War is skilfully employed to layer the movie with a sense of grim inevitability, with a gunned-down Pacino narrating from his deathbed.

After making one of the true disaster movies of the 80s - Bonfire of the Vanities - Carlito's Way is a real mid-season return to form for the veteran De Palma. Even if it's not up with the cream of contemporary gangster pictures (Coppola's Godfather Part II, Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, Scorsese's Goodfellas) then it's a worthy runner-up and one of this director's best movies to date.