At Anorak: The Five Most Underrated Brian De Palma Thrillers

My newest article at Anorak obsesses on one of my favorite directors: Brian De Palma. Specifically, I gaze at five great but highly underrated thrillers from the director of such favorites as Dressed to Kill (1980), Body Double (1984), and The Untouchables (1987).

In "The Five Most Underrated Brian De Palma Thrillers" I tally some of the great productions that aren't as popular as those listed above, but which nonetheless reveal the director's penchant for tricky narratives, and masterful visualizations.

Here's a snippet:

"Since the early 1970s, director Brian De Palma has crafted many intense and highly cerebral thrillers.

Alas, such efforts are often dismissed by critics as being overly imitative of Alfred Hitchcock’s films and style rather than praised for their own finely-developed sense of intertextuality and intellectual gamesmanship. 

In short, De Palma is much more than either “The New Hitchcock” or -- as he is sometimes known -- “The American Godard.”  Instead, this uber-formalist is a deeply film-literate director who mines the visual canon of established masters (including Kubrick, Eisenstein and Antonioni) and co-opts their most famous imagery for new, and often highly imaginative purposes.

Although the artist is often tagged for perceived misogyny in his violent thrillers, De Palma’s best thrillers merge social commentary (often encoded in the visuals) and a critique of the medium of film itself, a technological art form which, in De Palma’s lexicon “lies” 24 frames-a-second. 

What many critics detect as “voyeurism” is actually an exploration, instead, of the way that film allows us to see, experience, and interpret a narrative, or perhaps competing narratives.

In De Palma’s work, seeing and “knowing” are often two vastly different things, and sight and knowledge are frequently confused by the protagonists. We see this duality explored in many acknowledged and well-received De Palma thrillers, including Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981), but also in the films that have not been as warmly welcomed.

With that description in mind, here my five selections for the most underrated De Palma thrillers."