Sometimes, recommending a "classic filmmaker" feels a little like recommending vegetables. In an age when free time is sparse and real life is full of inherent struggle, why use the precious moments we have to watch movies that require mental taxation, sitting through slogs, or reckoning with works wholly unconcerned with basic entertainment?

I promise you: You will not have this problem watching Brian De Palma, one of our most singular filmmakers concerned with the ideas of cinematic "pleasure." His prolific body of work, from 1968 until today, is full of pure entertainment, of provocative subject matter, of genres stuffy cineastes often denigrate as being lesser-than. De Palma is an all-caps DIRECTOR, an artist who blows out his frames with delicious techniques, a visual stylist of the most propulsive order.

We've curated a list of De Palma's 12 most essential films, an intriguing list of entertainment that will shock you, titillate you, and simply demand your attention. From his sleazy horror-thriller odysseys to his mainstream thrill rides to his surprisingly political experimentations, these Brian De Palma films will never bore you, will always surprise you, and will leave you wanting more. Enjoy watching...

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Sisters

Margot Kidder in Sisters
Image via AIP

The urtext of what we think of as “a Brian De Palma film” (though he cut his teeth making experimental comedies with none other than Robert de Niro), Sisters shocks and unsettles from its striking opening titles onwards. Many of de Palma’s thematic and aesthetic obsessions are on full display already: his graphically updated takes on Hitchcockian plots, his emphasis on the temptation and horrors of voyeurism, his split-screens and split-diopters, and constantly roving cameras. The wonderful Margot Kidder plays our title sisters, born conjoined and now separated. One of the twins, Dominique, has become a raving, murdering lunatic — but the plot becomes much more complicated than that. Psychosexual, familial, and visceral traumas abound in this gripping horror-thriller, somehow both accessibly candy-coated and aggressive in its moral complications. Sisters is the film equivalent of the best pulp paperback you’ll ever read and serves as the perfect introduction to de Palma’s immaculately constructed descents into cinematic darkness. 

Phantom of the Paradise

William Finley in Phantom of the Paradise
Image via 20th Century Fox

Like many of De Palma’s films, Phantom of the Paradise did not get a fair shake upon its original release, earning largely poor reviews. But it has aged like a spectacularly splashy bottle of rosé, a perfect pairing for those who love The Rocky Horror Picture Show and want more like that. The raucous rock musical fuses the classical tropes from texts like The Phantom of the Opera and Faust with the modern seductions of excessive pleasures, self-aware camp, and style out the utter wazoo. While De Palma wrote and directed the film, the ever-iconic Paul Williams (“Rainbow Connection,” the fun arms butcher in Baby Driver) should be considered an integral author, as he wrote all the music and lyrics, plays the villainous Swan, and sings for our heroic Phantom, otherwise played by William Finley. This Phantom sells his soul for rock and roll pretty much literally and tumbles his way through a tragedy of betrayal, romance, and you better believe it, so much voyeurism. It’s hard to stress just how friggin’ entertaining this film is, and how pure the central emotions ring even with all the performative pomp and circumstance surrounding it.

Carrie

Sissy Spacek in Carrie
Image via United Artists

The earliest, and still one of the best, Stephen King adaptations, Carrie cements De Palma’s status as one of our most influential horror filmmakers. The careful work on this film has rippled throughout horror cinema since, from its centralization on uniquely female issues (Jennifer’s Body!), to its blunt allegories about familial trauma being scarier than the “actual scary thing” (The Babadook!), to its all-timer fake-out jump scare ending (Friday the 13th!). Sissy Spacek is phenomenal as our title character, relentlessly ostracized by her high school peers and bullied into submission by her fundamentalist mother, a phenomenal Piper Laurie. Carrie is such an easy character to feel sorry for, to almost feel a sense of catharsis when her reach for any sense of self-actualization becomes fueled by rage and mayhem in the form of telekinetic powers. And when Carrie lets it all unleash at the prom, as a result of a vicious, blood-soaked prank, look the fuck out. De Palma’s usage of split-screen is unparalleled, but this sequence of terror and carnage and revenge just might be his masterpiece. Visually, emotionally, and terrifyingly rendered with care and élan.

Dressed to Kill

Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill
Image via Filmways Pictures

The reductive, almost catty pitch of Dressed to Kill is “Psycho but everything cranked to 11.” First of all: Hell yeah, sounds good! Second of all: There is so much more going on in De Palma’s lurid masterpiece of provocation, and to reduce it (or any of his work) to simple homage or even rip-off is to blatantly ignore many of its intentionally tricky moves. This is a film that messes up the lines of sexual liberation, obsession, psychological madness, and hell yes, voyeurism until they are an absolute knotted mess; so much so that the film was accused of misogyny upon release and transphobia in its modern reckonings. For me, I find the film to be compellingly forward in its depictions of female desire and kink, and intentional in our cross-dressing killer’s nonunderstanding or reckoning of self-identity as a manifestation of their psychosis, not as an aspersion on the trans community at large (though I more than understand my perspective is nowhere near the end of this necessary conversation). All of these depictions collapse into violence with intentionally campy hyperbole, making Dressed to Kill a work of complicated art without complicated pretension, well-crafted without the usual signifiers of prestige, a welcomely bug nuts psychosexual thriller for the ages.

Blow Out

blow-out-john-travolta
Image via Filmways Pictures

I’ve spoken a lot about De Palma’s focus on voyeurism in both form and content. But Blow Out might be his purest exploration of that idea, resulting in what might be his best front-to-back movie of all. The plot crackles to a start because John Travolta, a soundman for the movies, was spying "innocently" on a couple while recording sounds outside for a new, trashy horror movie (one with an opening sequence that feels a helluva lot like Dressed to Kill; this man loves homage so much he does it to himself!). Until the “innocence” lurches into the accidental witnessing of a horrific car accident… or is it? Travolta simply can’t stop looking, searching, poring over every frame, flinging himself from an observational role to an active role into a mystery and conspiracy with implications at the top of the most nefarious of powerful systems and structures. De Palma simply owns the thriller genre in this picture, taking this simple idea of “seeing something you shouldn’t have” and stretching it until the tension becomes unbearable — while setting up countless other mini-thriller set pieces and sequences in the meanwhile! And when the tension explodes at the final moments of the film, De Palma finds, simply, one of the great thriller endings of all time, a melding of the “innocent” and “impure” impulses of voyeurism that will ring in your head longer than it does Travolta’s character. What a ride!

The Untouchables

Sean Connery and Kevin Costner in The Untouchables
Image via Paramount Pictures

In the 1980s and '90s, De Palma began turning away from self-generated scripts about his own, lavishly rendered obsessions to use his lavish visual skills on mainstream, Hollywood, "blockbuster entertainment" material. But he simply could not phone these types of films in, thank God for us. 

The Untouchables has a script from the iconic David Mamet, and an utterly iconic ensemble cast that includes Kevin Costner, Robert de Niro, Patricia ClarksonAndy Garcia, and an Academy Award-winning Sean Connery. De Palma, thus, gets the chance to produce one of the smoothest, most immaculately constructed pieces of "entertainment" of his career, delivering a picture that grips, throttles, crackles with set pieces of action and suspense, and even hits all its emotional beats. But interspersed within its simple plot — Eliot Ness puts together a team to take down Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago — and its easily quotable, typically Mametian hyper-masculine bon mots — "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way." — lies De Palma's sneakily provocative, even satirical point of view of this material. De Palma's excesses are still on full display; they just happen to be pointed at the idea of "black and white morality," showing Costner as a hyperbolic Boy Scout and de Niro as a hyperbolic monster. Parts of The Untouchables are so earnest, so lavishly classically "Hollywood" that you can't help but giggle at them; as if De Palma is updating and exaggerating the impulses of the Hays code-era gangster pictures. 

Plus, if you need one sequence to prove that de Palma's homages are more than simple mimicry, just watch his take on Battleship Potemkin's classic Odessa Steps sequence. He takes that simple idea and crystallizes it into one of the most suspenseful set pieces you'll ever see, a feat of pure cinema that would not exist without its bold, active respect to cinema before.

Casualties of War

The cast of Casualties of War
Image via Columbia Pictures

Thus far, all of De Palma's films discussed have a level of cheekiness to them. But what happens when the visual muckraker turns his considerable skills onto serious, disturbing material based on truth?

As it turns out, he makes one of the best, most harrowing, most vital anti-war films ever made. Casualties of War is an upsetting watch, one that slowly peels back the toxic psychology behind American soldiers in the Vietnam War until the combination of pervasive boredom, enemy dehumanization, and sudden violence explodes into unforgivable cruelty. Sean Penn plays an unstable soldier with a horrific plan to rape, torture, and kill a young Vietnamese woman, played by Thuy Thu Le, as a kind of entitled outlet of forced "victory." Michael J. Fox, in a rare and utterly effective dramatic role, plays Penn's inferior officer whose conscience cannot allow him to participate in the act, but whose complicity to military structure cannot allow him to actively stop it. The film is a work of psychological dissection, deterioration, and destruction; a vicious blow against so many miserable systems that so many men subscribe to wholesale. But to get to this systemic conclusion, De Palma trains his lens on individual stories, dialing in the screws of his considerable visual skills in favor of depth rather than width. De Palma's work here is remarkable, upsetting without spilling into tastelessness, and ultimately interested in a sense of justice, dignity, and change. You won't forget this film anytime soon.

Mission: Impossible

Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible
Image via Paramount Pictures

In 1996, De Palma scored his largest mainstream hit to date: A goddamn action blockbuster starring goddamn Tom Cruise called goddamn Mission: Impossible, kickstarting one of our most financially and creatively successful action franchises. It's quite interesting rewatching the original Mission: Impossible after being inundated with the relentless pace and go-for-broke set pieces of the contemporary films; it's almost even "quaint." De Palma's films, especially his genre pieces, are usually loud pieces of work. But Mission: Impossible's appeal comes from its emphasis on procedure, on professionals, on putting one's head down and making sense of it all. Yes, there's gunfire and subway chases and that bold Danny Elfman reimagining of the classic, bombastic 5/4 theme music. But it's telling that the film's most iconic moment — Cruise's Ethan Hunt wiring down into an office, unable to make a sound or even sweat without failing the mission — works because of its sense of patience, of thoroughness, of suspense, of slowness. Somehow, De Palma took his biggest shot to make one of his most narrow genre pictures, and I am very thankful for it. 

Snake Eyes

Nicolas Cage and Gary Sinise in Snake Eyes
Image via Paramount Pictures

Snake Eyes just utterly freakin' rips so hard. This feels like the platonic ideal of a "big-budget, studio-financed Brian De Palma film," a work of complete propulsion, imagination, invention, and bald-faced crowd-pleasing. It begins with, perhaps, the shot of De Palma's career, a oner at a boxing match that sets up both Nicolas Cage and Gary Sinise's odd couple characters, the fascinatingly eccentric world they find themselves in, and the stakes of the delicious premise — a giant feat of storytelling juggling, not to mention its gargantuan technical achievement, somehow feeling both effortless and "wild as heck"! But the overture is just a taste of things to come, as Snake Eyes puts Cage (god, Cage is such a good actor for De Palma to play with, and vice versa) on a head-down path toward possible destruction or redemption, twisting the knife at every turn, throwing every cinematic trick in the book to most purposefully and entertainingly tell this sordid tale. I'm not sure I would ever do one of those AMC private theater rentals, but if I did, and they could let me show any movie I wanted, I would pack the house and listen to them enjoy Snake Eyes for the first time. 

Femme Fatale

femme-fatale-antonio-banderas-rebecca-romijn-social-feature
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

If Snake Eyes begins with the shot of De Palma's career, Femme Fatale might begin with the sequence of his career. Scored to Ryuichi Sakamoto's mischievous "Bolerish" — a piece that, like many of De Palma's films, directly references a classic piece while heightening it to make a new statement — Femme Fatale begins with one of the greatest heists you'll ever see on screen, a work of exacting intention in every shot and cut, a piece of bravura filmmaking rife with provocative eroticism and audience-sweating suspense.

From there, all bets are off. Working from his screenplay again, De Palma truly throws every single idea onto the screen, having Rebecca Romijn play both a classic blonde femme fatale type and a classic brunette ingenue until all of these identities and labels and cinematic signifiers are smushed together. Antonio Banderas comes along for the ride, having the time of his life, as a paparazzo in way over his head (aka the perfect opportunity to incorporate as many themes of voyeurism as possible). And these two charismatic lead performers fling themselves fully into the slinky, bonkers, aggressive vision, a vision that subsumes all in its wake, that seduces and intoxicates without any need for a chaser. Its ending is... really something. I don't know how he gets away with it, but he absolutely does. 

Redacted

Daniel Stewart Sherman in Redacted
Image via Magnolia Pictures

Redacted is a harrowing, vital watch. Playing in some ways like a horrifically "updated" companion piece to De Palma's own Casualties of WarRedacted eschews de Palma's usual command of "traditional cinematic form" in favor of a mixed-media collage of how folks were consuming information in the 2000s. By using this method of alternating sources, from a soldier's camera to news feeds from different countries to proto-vlogs on poorly designed websites, Redacted casts a wide and deep net, a thorough, even exhausting evaluation of the life of an American soldier in the George W. Bush Iraq War — one that, like Casualties before it, involves pervasive nothingness, dehumanization as a foundational tactic, and the eventual eruption of an unforgivable act of violence. In using an unknown ensemble cast, De Palma burrows even deeper into the skin and skull of these subjects without any "movie star" expectations, yielding utterly devastating results of warfare, both psychological and visceral. Redacted is an important snapshot of recent history, a queasy harbinger of where our society is going now, and a fascinating reshuffling of a cinematic master's tools. 

Passion

Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams in Passion
Image via Entertainment One

One thing I particularly love about Brian De Palma is his acknowledgment of the artifice of cinema. In fact, De Palma's command of performatively artificial cinematic techniques usually results in total immersion, a handshake of good faith between the filmmaker and the audience, a suspension of disbelief so strong it turns into straight-up belief.

Passion, on the other hand, doesn't allow us to go that deep. It keeps its inherent artifice as artificial as possible, becoming one of de Palma's most purposefully campy, even funny movies. The director is diving back into his, well, passions, spinning a psychosexual yarn of madness, obsession, eroticism, and — the last time you'll read this word, I promise — voyeurism. Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams have the time of their lives in their arch, somewhat alien-feeling performances, flinging themselves just outside the margins of a twisty, corporate espionage environment, playing everything "in quotes." De Palma's bag of tricks, on display and delicious as ever, beg to be used as tools of observation, rather than assistants toward immersion. In his most recently essential film, De Palma has finally made something designed to turn everyone who watches it into a voyeur, rather than an active participant. I promise I mean this as a compliment: Passion feels like the movie Tommy Wiseau was trying to make with The Room.

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