Brian De Palma - lover of style and ridiculous violence - came into his own in the 1980s, and easily one of the best films he made in this period is The Untouchables. It's a revisionist prohibition-era gangster movie based on the exploits of government agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), at a time when he and his squad were given the task of keeping America dry at all costs. In De Palma's hands, Ness' fight against Al Capone (a monstrous Robert De Niro being his most De Niro, and loving it) is embellished and transformed into a film dripping with style. There's punchy dialogue by David Mamet and a piano-and-harmonica-heavy score by Ennio Morricone, but most everyone who comes back to the film does it for the overblown, casually violent set-pieces. Many will tell you that the best things about The Untouchables are Sean Connery (in Oscar-winning, accent-mangling form) and the Eisenstein-homaging train station shootout, but there's a midway showdown on the Canada-United States border that really steals the show; a hell of a classy, bullet-strewn stand-off.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
