There's a haggard integrity to Al Pacino's erratic performance as Carlito Brigante, a Puerto Rican drug dealer who gets out of jail on a legal technicality in 1975 after doing five years on a 30-year rap. It's been Carlito's way since he was 14 to fuck with the law to grab the American dream of "clothes, cars and pussy." Now his blood is up for a new plan: going straight. But the streets of Spanish Harlem are meaner than when he left them, and they're pulling him back in.

Pacino knows the feeling…