Jake Cole’s review published on Letterboxd:
Golden hues turn flat-out angelic when they light up Johansson, though they also project a shadow behind her that looks like the outline of those too close to ground zero of a nuclear strike. The son of a Kraut immigrant knows before his superior officers come to him to fix an exhibition match that he has to use to his all-American partner and friend. That same man feels an empathy for the people of color terrorized by a local killer, but the partner quickly transfers the pair of them to follow up on this mysteriously and gruesomely mangled white girl. The partner has an obsessive need to rescue or avenge women, but he views them as damaged goods afterward; his is merely the least brazenly displayed misogyny. A bored rich girl whose father built a fortune off of perversely making the falsity of Hollywood real (in the form of slums made from film sets) scours the areas her family built and seduces a poor girl who looks like her in a twisted transference of her narcissistic class superiority.
De Palma flies through all these ideas and more in a densely packed two hours that leaves quite a lot unsaid around Hartnett's flat narration. The usual shot of officers in an office letting in strips of light through slitted blinds is complemented by the anarchic sight of a car burning in full view through an unblocked window. One death recalls VERTIGO as carried out by Oja Kodar in F FOR FAKE. The sets that made some of Hollywood's great silent classics, a time of rapid film development and discovery, are then used to churn out porn at the same rate two-reelers used to be produced. This is a full-on studio picture with airs of prestige, but this is BODY DOUBLE territory, and the elegance with which De Palma replicates the Expressionistic overtones of noir and its black-and-white compositions with Zsigmond's beautifully controlled color is merely a smokescreen for a deconstructive sense as devastatingly destructive as ever. As BRINGING OUT THE DEAD is for Scorsese, BLACK DAHLIA is one of De Palma's best marriages of style and substance.