De Palma (2016)Movies

Unlike superlatively soulless anti-poets-cum-pop-artists like Quentin Tarantino and prosaically pretentious pseudo-arthouse posers like Darren Aronofsky, who I will always loathe with an unrivaled passion, Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill, Scarface)—a virtual deracinated wop Hitchcock, albeit even more materialistic and pathologically-inclined—is a filmmaker that I used to really, really hate but have somewhat warmed up to over the years, in part because I look at him and his oeuvre from a quite different perspective than when I initially judged his work. Indeed, when comparing De Palma to great cinematic artists like Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer or truly subversive auteurs like Fassbinder and Pasolini, his films seem like shallow exercises in masturbatory...