If John Huston's name were not on Prizzi's Honor, I'd have thought a fresh new talent had burst on the scene, and he'd certainly be the hottest new director in Hollywood. The picture has a daring comic tone—it revels voluptuously in the murderous finagling of the members of a Brooklyn Mafia family, and rejoices in their scams. It's like The Godfather acted out by The Munsters, with passionate, lyrical arias from Italian operas pointing up their low-grade sentimentality...

As Anjelica Huston plays her, the raven-haired Maerose is a Borgia princess, a high-fashion Vampira who moves like a swooping bird and talks in a honking Brooklynese that comes out of the corner of her twisted mouth. Anjelica Huston seems to have grown into her bold features: she's a flinty beauty here—she has the imperiousness of a Maria Callas or a Silvana Mangano... Everything in this picture works with everything else—which is to say that John Huston has it all in the palm of his big, bony hand. You can feel a prickly excitement in the theatre. It's the kind of excitement that makes you say, "God, I love movies"—or, at least, "God, I love this movie."