Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 40

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  If you've been following along, you can probably guess what I hated about this. De Palma's style is great. He's got this slick, noirish feel that makes good use of shadow and reflection and odd angles to drive the intensity of any given scene, but almost right away, I predicted his big twist. And, of course, the twist left a sour taste in my mouth. All the Hitchcockian references, all the gloriously bloody murders, all the weird inventions by the hapless kid that could make this a great film seem wasted by the transphobic plotline.

  The list of films that commit this sin is a long one. [SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR OTHER FILMS--I CAN'T SAY WHICH ONES WITHOUT SPOILING THINGS ABOUT…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 12

  93/100

  The opening of Dressed to Kill, with its soft-core seduction and luscious yet calculated imagery, is Brian De Palma grasping his fundamental characteristics and shrinking them into a singular sequence of delight and horror. A woman, standing naked in the shower, is watching her husband shave behind the foggy glass, and as dreams morph into fantasies and nightmares, we as an audience witness an entire history of a relationship through sensual gestures and primal fixations.

  It is this woman, played by Angie Dickinson, who De Palma takes not as his main subject but as a flirtatious prisoner of sorts. Cutting from the opening sequence, we see Kate having sex with her husband in an unromantic and unsatisfying fashion, and…

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★ 1

  What if Psycho but way more perverted and problematic? Love it.

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  Review by Hari Nef 7

  dear brian de palma,

  let's link and build King. too soon for a remake? jason weinberg is my manager--do you know each other? he takes care of melanie griffith, whom you worked with on 'the bonfire of the vanities.' i think you'd just Adore me--as an actress, i mean! after all, i am a brunette

  love,
  hari

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  for better (and in some cases worse) de palma takes Psycho into the realm of giallo, pushing it to its trashiest, most fetishistic possible extreme. literally opens and closes on a perverse remix of the famous shower scene—one played as explicit sexual fantasy, the other trauma. the museum scene to the elevator kill is among his finest visual suspense sequences, the shot of allen catching a brief glimpse of the wide-angle mirror is one of the straight up scariest shots i've ever seen.

  full discussion on episode 130 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by sydney ★★★★ 5

  I like the acknowledgment of how tough it is to be a gal, the sympathetic look into an older woman's desires, the touched-upon-but-not-fully-developed issues of victim blaming, the confusions of masculinity and femininity. That all this is done from such a ~sexy~ male point of view is...questionable, as is, obviously, the implications of the ending. But the gender politics should be dissected by someone smarter and more knowledgeable than me.

  Leave all of that out of the equation, and you still have a beautiful thriller that pulls off being campy AND scary AND exciting AND emotional all at once. Elegant exploitation.

  De Palma had a Hitchcock marathon, watched a few 70's Argento films, drank a bottle of whiskey, passed out...and this film is us watching his dreams. The "rip off or homage?" debate is valid, but I like to think that he saw the sexuality just begging to be let out in Hitchcock's films, and decided to set it free.

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  Review by Ella Kemp ★★½

  Ooohhhh my name is Brian De Palma did you know I know what a split diopter is

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  Review by Scott Tobias ★★★★½

  Problematic fav.

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  Review by kailey ★★★½ 17

  brian de palma be like: cool shit, camera angles, dumb shit, sex!!!!, more cool shit, tension, sex!!!!!!!!!!!!!, pseudo-Freudian shit, confusing shit, more dumb shit, sex!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  add a bowl of steaming hitchcock, a pinch of red, and (unfortunately) some problematic and outdated stereotypes about trans-people. stir.

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★★ 7

  Brian De Palma is a crazy person with his absurd, American giallo Psycho movie.

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★★½ 9

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  The only remake of Psycho I accept!

  I'm starting to really enjoy De Palma's work. He's like at a 10/10 at all times and it's so fun to watch. It's like if Hitchcock directed an exploitation movie. He combines high-brow and low-brow similar to the way Tarantino does. The plot wasn't always airtight, but it was so well directed it didn't even matter. He throws things in the frame (a vagina in a painting while she's getting horny for the museum goer, or religious imagery), that are obvious but fun to catch. The constant zooms and closeups make everything feel big as well, adding to the suspense.

  I'm still anxious after watching this! The feeling that something is always around…

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  Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★★★

  De Palma é talvez nosso formalista mais conceitual justamente porque é um dos diretores que melhor lida com uma bagagem histórica-estética do cinema, e não é nem uma questão de reinventar certos modelos, mas de expandi-los a um tal grau icônico que esse movimento radical de mediação já se basta como concepção. O que nada mais é que a própria definição da arte conceitual, partir de um histórico elementar da própria linguagem e isolá-lo: os gestos suspensos nos slow motions, as replicações hitchcockianas, a câmera que faz questão de ser percebida em seus movimentos. Toda uma realidade que se funda a partir da historicidade da própria linguagem cinematográfica e tem por finalidade a genuína exposição dos seus aparatos ao mesmo tempo que reitera o seu encantamento primordial.