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Aug 3, 2022 · Critical of how the movie industry has changed since the days in which he, and the early filmmaking methods thrived, De Palma clarifies that it is this systemic change that irks him the most about modern cinema. “The whole system is changing,” the filmmaker expressed, “You used to go out and make a movie.
Jun 19, 2014 · Ultimately, the films of De Palma demonstrate the mechanics of movie making with an underlying awareness of cinema itself as a medium that like all art proves that style is vital to story. He also tried to abide by Howards Hawks’ philosophy of “three great scenes…” and as a result most critics agree that even his most “meh” films have flashes of genius.
- CARRIE (1976) Screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen, based on the novel by Stephen King. Starring Sissy Spacek, John Travolta, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, William Katt, Nancy Allen, Betty Buckley.
- SCARFACE (1983) Screenplay by Oliver Stone. Starring Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, Miriam Colon, F. Murray Abraham.
- BLOW OUT (1981) Written by De Palma. Starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, Dennis Franz. De Palma is at the height of his powers in “Blow Out,” a visual tour-de-force with some of the director’s most fully-realized characters.
- PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974) Written by De Palma. Starring Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper. “Phantom of the Paradise” is one of the oddest entries in De Palma’s filmography, a rock-and-roll “Phantom of the Opera” update that’s part musical, part horror film, and part satire that flopped big time when it was originally released.
- Sisters
- Phantom of The Paradise
- Carrie
- Dressed to Kill
- Blow Out
- The Untouchables
- Casualties of War
- Mission: Impossible
- Snake Eyes
- Femme Fatale
The urtext of what we think of as “a Brian De Palma film” (though he cut his teeth making experimental comedies with none other than Robert de Niro), Sisters shocks and unsettles from its striking opening titles onwards. Many of de Palma’s thematic and aesthetic obsessions are on full display already: his graphically updated takes on Hitchcockian p...
Like many of De Palma’s films, Phantom of the Paradise did not get a fair shake upon its original release, earning largely poor reviews. But it has aged like a spectacularly splashy bottle of rosé, a perfect pairing for those who love The Rocky Horror Picture Show and want more like that. The raucous rock musical fuses the classical tropes from tex...
The earliest, and still one of the best, Stephen King adaptations, Carrie cements De Palma’s status as one of our most influential horror filmmakers. The careful work on this film has rippled throughout horror cinema since, from its centralization on uniquely female issues (Jennifer’s Body!), to its blunt allegories about familial trauma being scar...
The reductive, almost catty pitch of Dressed to Kill is “Psycho but everything cranked to 11.” First of all: Hell yeah, sounds good! Second of all: There is so much more going on in De Palma’s lurid masterpiece of provocation, and to reduce it (or any of his work) to simple homage or even rip-off is to blatantly ignore many of its intentionally tri...
I’ve spoken a lot about De Palma’s focus on voyeurism in both form and content. But Blow Out might be his purest exploration of that idea, resulting in what might be his best front-to-back movie of all. The plot crackles to a start because John Travolta, a soundman for the movies, was spying "innocently" on a couple while recording sounds outside f...
In the 1980s and '90s, De Palma began turning away from self-generated scripts about his own, lavishly rendered obsessions to use his lavish visual skills on mainstream, Hollywood, "blockbuster entertainment" material. But he simply could not phone these types of films in, thank God for us. The Untouchables has a script from the iconic David Mamet,...
Thus far, all of De Palma's films discussed have a level of cheekiness to them. But what happens when the visual muckraker turns his considerable skills onto serious, disturbing material based on truth? As it turns out, he makes one of the best, most harrowing, most vital anti-war films ever made. Casualties of War is an upsetting watch, one that s...
In 1996, De Palma scored his largest mainstream hit to date: A goddamn action blockbuster starring goddamn Tom Cruise called goddamn Mission: Impossible, kickstarting one of our most financially and creatively successful action franchises. It's quite interesting rewatching the original Mission: Impossible after being inundated with the relentless p...
Snake Eyes just utterly freakin' rips so hard. This feels like the platonic ideal of a "big-budget, studio-financed Brian De Palma film," a work of complete propulsion, imagination, invention, and bald-faced crowd-pleasing. It begins with, perhaps, the shot of De Palma's career, a oner at a boxing match that sets up both Nicolas Cage and Gary Sinis...
If Snake Eyes begins with the shot of De Palma's career, Femme Fatale might begin with the sequence of his career. Scored to Ryuichi Sakamoto's mischievous "Bolerish" — a piece that, like many of De Palma's films,directly references a classic piece while heightening it to make a new statement — Femme Fatale begins with one of the greatest heists yo...
- Gregory Lawrence
Sep 25, 2024 · ‘The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs and Psychic Teens’ by Laurent Bouzereau looks at the work of the filmmaker.
Brian De Palma began making films in the sixties, under the influence of Brecht, Hitchcock, Godard, pop music and political paranoia. He’s had long-standing partnerships with editors Paul Hirsch and Bill Pankow, cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and Stephen H. Burum, and composer Pino Donaggio, all of whom have contributed enormously to his aesthetic.
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Dec 21, 2022 · Brian De Palma, with his virtuosic film-freak fetishism, is one of the most celebrated directors of the past half century, and if you ask De Palma stans what his greatest movie is, a lot of them ...
