The Black Dahlia is not the kind of film that gets made by accident or by noble failure, but with great purpose and alacrity. The Black Dahlia is pure acid satire, the rotten, putrid collapse of a pathetic reality into an even more pathetic fiction, with nothing left in the end. Reality is stage-managed badly in The Black Dahlia, capable of manipulation, of plot and counterplot, for ends venal, trivial, nonsensical. The Black Dahlia has no pretense to realism, not in itself, not as a period piece, not even as it sometimes seems to want to be, a poverty-row 1940's potboiler noir rushed out to capitalize on its true-crime subject. The visual field is shallow, stagy, small in scope, with…

The allure of De Palma tackling this story has tricked me into thinking I liked this more than I do. There’s some stuff I dig here—the Vilmos cinematography, the production design, and a few set-pieces with spots of that De Palma flair that I adore so much so I’m giving it a solid 2.5… but the wonky pacing and overly convoluted story (usually not an issue for me) just drag this thing down so much for me. I like Josh Hartnett just fine but this ain’t the film for him or his jerkoff haircut and no amount of alluring self proselytizing of this movie will ever get me to think otherwise.

Decent noir crime pulp with some slick visuals and a…

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…

Action! - The Master & The Fan: De Palma's Bags of Tricks Place Him Above Every Other Fan

Well, it appears that Brian De Palma either lost his mind or pushed himself too hard to unleash his inner David Lynch. Seriously, at times the film feels like Twin Peaks if set in a 1930s film noir.

I remember reading the novel that inspired the film when I was in high school, and it was a good read. On the plus side, I like De Palma's efforts to make the picture feel like a classic film noir from the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, there are Hitchcockian elements, such as when Josh enters this family's home and everything is filmed…

james ellroy's mother was raped and murdered in los angeles on june 22, 1958. the killer was never found, and while random leads still filter in from time to time, ellroy and the cops both know the chances of ever knowing are close to zero. one of his major themes in his works is that, in his words - "closure is bullshit".

brian de palma doesn't believe much in closure either. if it does happen, it's the closure of a life - like carlito's (in carlito's way), or of a dream, like laure's (in femme fatale). the synergy of these 2 boisterous personas, in their respective mediums leads to a film chock full of literary idioms, filmic homages and uniquely…

This movie is gorgeously shot and De Palma's direction gives it a stylish touch... but man is this film a mess.

Before the murder even happens, we spend like twenty minutes learning things about the main characters that never come into play again. It's a big waste of time and then, once the plot actually starts, we waste even more time with a terrible love triangle, if you can even call it that. It's kind of confusing. I think that's what it is but I might be wrong. Either way, it's not good. The plot is insanely convoluted and hard to follow, even by film noir standards.

The performances are all over the place. Josh Hartnett is more wooden than…

I saw this in theaters when I was 17 and haven’t revisited until tonight. It’s narratively messy and maybe should have went a little harder/sleazier and leaned more into the psychosexual doppelgänger angle…but I adored this rewatch. The Black Dahlia story is one that really fucks with my soul…the Hollywood nightmare of it all. The exploitation of women and the corruption of LAPD and the web of capitalist greed. It’s so tragic and scary and sad and this movie really captures that vibe so perfectly for me. Hartnett really had/has the goods for this kinda fucked up piggie. William Finely reprising his killer role from Murder a la Mod lol. Incredible KD Lang lesbo bar sequence. Hot damn. It’s absolutely…

I was once ready to argue this as De Palma's best of the 21st century and one of the best American movies of the 2000s. The cracks are too deep to ignore, as the script is trying to retain the precision of Ellroy's prose à la the adaptation of L.A. Confidential while De Palma is homing in more beautifully on the ambiance that Ellroy can conjure with that writing (and that imo L.A. Confidential lacks). The tensions pull this apart just a bit too much for it to be a masterpiece, but I would still reach for this over Curtis Hanson's more coherent but polite rendering of Ellroy's L.A. underbelly. This is as masterful an update/detonation of noir as Femme…