"A is for Auteur is officially described as a 'beautifully-crafted alphabet book to inspire the next generation of cinephiles,'" Taylor writes in the post. "It features 'references to more than 200 films from Alfred Hitchcock to Agnès Varda,' told in the style you’ve come to know and love from the card game. I’ve read the book and it’s incredibly fun and charming, with gorgeous illustrations and told in a sing-song-y nursery rhyme style that is perfect for leaving an impression on your budding movie lover."

Taylor then adds, "Along those lines we are also thrilled to debut an exclusive page from the book devoted to living legend Brian De Palma, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday. I mean, is that awesome or what?"

This stranded film may indeed exist on an island within De Palma’s body of work, but if so it is an island of profound importance for the De Palma project, possibly a projection of where De Palma is heading with his art. The accidental nature of the lack of shooting days, or De Palma’s inability to oversee the final mixing and whatnot, can hardly wipe away what seems to me like a reasonably close facsimile of what De Palma originally intended to create, a film that was perhaps intended as a new step forward in his work—a step, perhaps, that goes beyond anything he’s ever done. Beyond in what direction? I have no idea. It is perhaps not beyond but deeper within his own artistic persona, so deep that it can only manifest itself on the surface in Domino’s austere images seemingly stripped of the usual ornamentation one is used to in De Palma. Next to something like Passion, Domino appears almost as post-cinema; compared to De Palma’s recent work it is disarmingly straight-forward, no narrative tricks à la Passion or Femme Fatale, no mystery between dream and reality or anything like that. It is instead bluntly barreling ahead and, I’d say, reaching for a new and deeper understanding of reality and the film image that captures it.

"The 2016 documentary De Palma, now streaming on Netflix, gave the feeling of resolving the matter. The director sat down with fellow filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, much as Hitchcock had with François Truffaut, and went film by film through his career. No one who saw the documentary could doubt De Palma’s sincerity, the range of his work or, particularly, his command of film language. De Palma turned 80 this month, and at this point it seems uncontroversial to rank him among the living masters of the cinematic form.

"What recent appraisals haven’t settled, though, is a pettier tiff among De Palma’s fans, about the 'right' way to appreciate De Palma. You liked The Untouchables (1987) and think it’s one of his best? Too bad. If you’re talking to a De Palma fanatic, The Untouchables was a commercial effort, written by David Mamet, and to see it as superior to a De Palma-penned Psycho pastiche like Dressed to Kill (1980) is to miss his originality.

"My own enthusiasms, as Robert De Niro’s Al Capone might call them, have varied wildly over time, from skepticism to appreciation and back. But if even inveterate De Palma watchers sometimes get tsk-tsked for their taste, where does that leave newcomers? I propose that a good middle ground is to start with a De Palma classic from his freewheeling 1970s-’80s period, Blow Out, and to continue with one of his finest studio efforts, Carlito’s Way. Aficionados may howl at that one as insufficiently pure-grade. (David Koepp, not De Palma, wrote the script, which mostly plays it straight.) But in De Palma, the director himself remembers watching Carlito’s Way and thinking, 'I can’t make a better picture than this.'"

In fact, back in 2002, De Palma had chosen these very same two pictures to bookend a career retrospective at the Pompidou in Paris. Two sides of the same personal coin, the two films share a similar sense of tragedy, irony, and fate.

Earlier this month, the blogger at You Remind Me Of The Frame discussed De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise as "a complex and intertextual satire" that nevertheless "operates independently" of its references. Kenigsberg echoes that viewpoint in his discussion of Blow Out:

Part of what makes “Blow Out” quintessential De Palma is that it wears its influences proudly — but also recombines them to make them fully the director’s own. The basic premise is consciously indebted to Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” (1966), which concerns a photographer who accidentally captures evidence of a murder. But De Palma’s film uses the setup to create a thriller, something that Antonioni’s study of disaffection in swinging London steadfastly refused to be.

“Blow Out” centers on a movie sound man, Jack (John Travolta), who unwittingly records audio that could prove a fatal car accident was a political assassination. Antonioni is only the most superficial influence. De Palma borrowed the car accident off the bridge from the Chappaquiddick scandal involving Ted Kennedy. Jack pores over individual frames of the murder scene as if parsing the Zapruder footage, which gets a shout-out. De Palma has cited the Watergate operative G. Gordon Liddy as his inspiration for the villain (John Lithgow), who has vastly exceeded his mandate by killing and goes to extreme lengths to cover his tracks.

Although the film has something to say about what was at the time recent American history and the public’s capacity to turn a blind eye to corruption, on several levels “Blow Out” is a movie about movies and the apparent contradiction they contain.

On one hand, movies offer the promise of capturing the truth. Jack, who recorded the accident while making audio of whooshing wind for a horror movie, turns increasingly to film to prove his case. He cuts still photos of the accident from a magazine and animates them, synchronizing them to the audio he’s recorded to create a mini-documentary of the crime scene.

On the other hand, movies are inherently constructions, with the capacity to fabricate. “Blow Out” has already lied to us by opening with an elaborate fake-out: a sequence from the point of view of a slasher stalking coeds that turns out to be a film within the film. (This sequence represented De Palma’s first use of the Steadicam, which was then a novel device, and a tool he has used to extraordinary effect ever since.) The sequence ends with the stalker about to murder a showering woman, and she lets out a pitiful scream; cut to the screening room, where we learn that Jack hasn’t bothered to dub the actress. The search for a believable fake scream frames the movie. In the final irony, he will hear that perfect scream in real life.

Deeper into the essay, Nashawaty digs into a couple of the film's key moments:

The opening scene of the film is so directly borrowed from Francis Coppola’s The Godfather that it goes beyond homage into outright theft. An immigrant visits a mob boss, hat in hand, asking for a favor. But before you can press charges, the Coens deliver the film’s now-iconic image as the opening credits appear—that black hat blowing in the wind like an ominous reverie that eludes the dreamer’s grasp. Carter Burwell’s score turns the image into pure undiluted poetry. There’s a reason why the very same theme was repurposed to sell the trailer for The Shawshank Redemption a four years later.

But what, you may ask, makes Miller’s Crossing better than Fargo or The Big Lebowski or No Country For Old Men or Inside Llewyn Davis? Of course, these things are all subjective. But I can’t think of another Coen brothers film with as much sheer ambition. It dares to turn a pair of traditionally streamlined genres (film noir, gangster pictures) into something so convoluted it borders on the Baroque. This isn’t a movie where characters double-cross one another, they triple- and quadruple-cross one another until your head starts to hurt. Tamping down the visual pyrotechnics of Raising Arizona, Sonnenfeld gives the film an almost-stately sepia period palette. His technique in the film’s greatest sequence, where Finney’s Leo unleashes tommy-gun justice on a pair of assassins sent to kill him while he’s at home lying in bed in his silk bathrobe listening to “Danny Boy” on the phonograph, is the single greatest Brian De Palma wind-up that De Palma never directed. Almost every actor in the film gives the best performance of their career in Miller’s Crossing, especially Turturro, Polito, and Harden, whose incestuous, “sick twist” Verna bristles with the sort of ferocious, tough-talking fatalism that would have put Gloria Grahame, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lauren Bacall out of work had the film been made in the ‘40s.

Alci Rengifo, Entertainment Voice

When Netflix granted maverick producer Ryan Murphy carte blanche to make original content, they essentially unleashed his obsession with aesthetic. When approaching his latest Netflix offering, “Ratched,” understanding the Murphy look and feel is key. Officially this is some kind of prequel about Nurse Ratched, the domineering, dark authoritarian in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” made iconic by Louise Fletcher. But dismiss the 1975 movie, or even the original 1962 Ken Kesey novel. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen the movie or read the book. This series has no connection to them aside from the character’s last name. The rest is pure, demented reinvention, sometimes bordering on goofy, but never boring to look at.

In the Murphy universe it all begins with murder. It’s the early ‘50s and a young man named Edmund Tolleson (Finn Wittrock) flips out and kills several priests, apparently convinced one was his father. Edmund will surely face execution and is sent to the Lucia State Hospital, located in a picturesque spot in California. It is here where Nurse Mildred Ratched (Sarah Paulson) arrives looking for work. Stern and focused, Ratchd nearly intimidates the hospital’s chief doctor, Dr. Richard Hanover (Jon Jon Briones). Hanover is desperate for funding, practically begging the state governor, George Wilburn (Vincent D’Onofrio). Ratched doesn’t mind the lack of positions, she finds a way to push one nurse out and get her spot. It’s soon evident her real reason for being at the hospital is to get close to Edmund. The killer will soon become the poster child for the hospital’s rehabilitation efforts, which verge from misguided to horrific. Ratched will become a player in it all, even connecting romantically with another character in ways she would have never dreamed.

“Ratched” is not necessarily a creation of Murphy. Some attention has been given to how it began as a spec script by Loyola Marymount University film student Evan Romansky four years ago. Along with Murphy, Michael Douglas, who produced the 1975 movie, is also tapped as a producer here. However there is no denying the real force behind the show. Murphy’s stamp is on every episode. It’s a better entertainment than his “Hollywood” series from earlier this year, a revisionist history of the Hollywood Golden Age. But like that series, “Ratched” works best as a visual experiment than as a story. While it’s a timeless classic, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is not “Star Wars,” so it’s not as if audiences have been dying for a prequel. So Murphey lets loose, making every chapter a mad melodrama with heightened colors, camera angles that are obvious homages to Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, and a music score taken straight out of “Cape Fear” or “Psycho.” Many sequences find Ratched walking down a hall as the lighting turns to a hypnotic green or red. The décor, even of the Lucia State Hospital, is lush and seductive to the eye. Never has a mental institution looked this alluring anywhere else. It could be a spa from hell. There are individual moments that can be enjoyed just for Murphy’s fixation on details, like a seaside meal between Ratched and Gwendolyn Briggs (Cynthia Nixon), who works for the governor and gets very close to the nurse. Ratched tastes oysters for the first time, and the scene is done in a way where we can almost taste them ourselves.

Typical accoutrements for eating raw oysters include cocktail sauce and mignonette, plus or minus a curious spirit for the uninitiated. The key accompaniment is subtlety. But subtlety is served rarely in the Ryan Murphy extended universe, so when Mildred Ratched (Sarah Paulson) and Gwendolyn Briggs (Cynthia Nixon) take a seat at an oceanside restaurant and order an oyster plate, the sexual undertones don’t go “under” at all. They’re as low-key as a jackhammer. But that’s okay. The eroticism and flirtation rest on the surface like vinegar in the shell. Gwendolyn is giving her Mildred her first taste of oysters while handholding her through a metaphor for oral pleasure.

This scene is set about halfway through “Ice Pick,” the second episode in the origin story series “Ratched” on Netflix. Like many productions Murphy puts his name on, he serves as an executive producer and developer; the creator is Evan Romansky, taking pages from Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” as well as Miloš Forman’s 1975 adaptation, which is arguably more widely embraced by pop culture than its source material. Regardless, Romansky’s series functions as a “What if?” taking viewers back nearly 20 years to Nurse Ratched’s arrival at Salem State Hospital, back when she was driven by morals and ideals and didn’t approach every patient like a nail. She’s still cunning and ruthless, of course, conniving her way into employment at a mental hospital in Northern California, but she’s also appalled by certain practices seen as state-of-the-art for the times, like hydrotherapy.

“True monsters are made, not born,” reads Netflix’s logline for the show. If that thesis held up as one episode fades into the next, “Ratched” might have better cogency, though even if the writing betrays the basic conceit, the narrative still hums along nicely. What actually hobbles “Ratched” is the Russian nesting doll effect of structuring a prequel around the chief antagonist in a movie based on a book. Characters like Nurse Ratched don’t require explanation. In fact, they can’t be explained at all. They exist solely to provide a wall for protagonists to collide with. Sometimes inhumanity’s roots demand excavation. Most times they’re best left rooted in the dirt.

What’s especially frustrating about Romansky’s enterprise is that “Nurse Ratched” could have done just fine on its own merit divorced from pre-existing intellectual property; as a kinky thriller about a haunted and unstable medical professional who sabotages her peers, bumps off the occasional patient, and disposes of the bodies, all while struggling with her late-stage sexual awakening and a dose of wartime trauma, the show works and handily outclasses Murphy’s other 2020 projects, “Hollywood” and “The Politician.” Think of “Nurse Ratched” as a confluence where the movies of Brian De Palma and Alfred Hitchcock pool together with genre plots about evil nurses, buttressed by the excess that defines Murphy’s brand. The resultant mixture proves satisfying by the end of the pilot’s opening sequence, where Edmund Tolleson (Finn Wittrock) brutally kills a quartet of clergymen with throat slashes, dozens of stab wounds, and one head smash.

Sounds like the start of a new season of “American Horror Story,” except the scares are replaced by the sense of watching strangers undress through their upstairs window. The naughtiness that partially, but substantially drives “Nurse Ratched”s plot feels like a release, even when Romansky and his writing team—comprising Murphy, naturally, as well as his usual cohort Ian Brennan and Jennifer Salt—pause it for genre-mandated bloodletting and squeamish discomforts, ranging from LSD-fueled delimbings to cranial lobotomies performed at the business end of an ice pick (in case Episode 2’s title doesn’t immediately give away the game.) In “American Horror Story,” images like that would be the showcase. Here, it’s more like a set of bookends to prop up complicated bedroom roleplay, Mildred’s sexual self-denial, and her mission to get herself as close to Tolleson as possible. Turns out they’re related, the “how” being revealed in, again, “Ice Pick,” one of the series’ fundamental chapters.