Warner Bros. Pictures/Quinta Communications presents a film written and directed by Brian De Palma. Running time: 114 minutes. Rated R (for strong sexuality, violence and language).
A. O. Scott of the New York Times unintentionally describes the contrasting viewpoints of critics to Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale in his own review today. If you like narrative coherence, plausible emotion and accomplished acting, this movie ... may not be for you, he writes. It is, however, a reminder that there is sometimes more to movies than character and story, that formal dexterity and visual inventiveness ... and some nice-looking people can be the vehicles of exhilaration and surprise. Clearly several critics fall into the former group. Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail comments caustically: Even if it's accepted simply as glitter-sprayed trash, sophomorically plotted and incompetently acted, Femme Fatale is a uniquely De Palma kind of effluence, an exercise in auteur self-parody. John Anderson of Newsday calls it outrageously stylized, harebrained but weirdly fascinating. To Megan Turner in the New York Post, it's woefully defective. To Claudia Puig in USA Today, it's a leaden clunker. Steve Murray in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution concludes: This thing is absurd. Its pre-MTV, film-school tics can be more alienating than engrossing, and the characters on-screen are puppets, not people. And Philip Wuntch in the Dallas Morning News writes that the script is so confusing that the most common audience reaction probably will be, 'Huh?' Many critics, including those who enjoyed the film, use the expression over the top to describe De Palma's approach. But the director certainly has a large rooting section going for him. Manohla Dargis in the Los Angeles Times describes the movie as exuberant, blissfully entertaining ... the smartest, most pleasurable expressions of pure movie love to come from an American director in years. Across town, in the Los Angeles Daily News, Bob Strauss, although remarking that De Palma's script is too clever by half, nevertheless pronounces it one of the director's most brilliant exercises in seeing, peeping, misdirection and deception. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times begins his review this way: Sly as a snake, Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale is a sexy thriller that coils back on itself in seductive deception. This is pure filmmaking, elegant and slippery. And Ty Burr of the Boston Globe remarks at the outset of his review: My, it's nice to have Brian De Palma back in the saddle.