Scarface (1983 film) to leave the antihero floating face down in a literal bloodbath." The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes offers a contemporary interpretation of the film's reception, providing an 81% approval rating from 68 critics – an average rating of 7.4/10 – with the following consensus: "Director Brian De Palma and star Al Pacino take it to the limit in this stylized, ultra-violent and eminently quotable gangster epic that walks a thin white line between moral drama and celebratory excess." Metacritic gives it an average score of 65/100. "Scarface" was released theatrically in North America on December 9, 1983. The film earned
Brian De Palma enrolled at the newly coed Sarah Lawrence College as a graduate student in their theater department in the early 1960s, becoming one of the first male students among a female population. Once there, influences as various as drama teacher Wilford Leach, the Maysles brothers, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol, and Alfred Hitchcock impressed upon De Palma the many styles and themes that would shape his own cinema in the coming decades. An early association with a young Robert De Niro resulted in "The Wedding Party". The film, which was co-directed with Leach and producer Cynthia Munroe, had been shot