As Chris tells it, "Wright then said that in fact his list to Criterion had been alphabetical and he didn't realize that numbers would be assigned. He said that he did love the film though, as well as others of De Palma's: saying he loved Carrie also, but that his favorite was probably Phantom Of The Paradise. He finished by saying that yes sometime he would like to do a 'straight thriller, or horror film'."

'BABY DRIVER' & SOMETHING CLOSE TO SILENT MOVIES
As he was making the rounds three years ago for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (which was partially under the influence of De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise), Wright talked to The Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth about a screenplay he was working on called Baby Driver that had a strong De Palma influence: "Well, it’s something I’ve been meaning to write for ages. I really planned to recharge my batteries and get back into writing. I’m excited about doing something that’s almost purely visual, because I’ve done three films—and even though Scott Pilgrim is very visual, it’s very dialogue heavy as well, which is great. And music heavy. Yeah. I think I’d like to try something—I’m a big Brian De Palma fan, and I’ll sit and look at something like Carrie, and I like the fact that it starts to play out like a silent movie. There’s a point in Carrie in the last half hour where there’s no need for any more dialogue because the plot is in motion. Or something like [Jean-Pierre Melville's] Le Samourai, I look at something like that and think, wow, there’s hardly any dialogue in this film. Something like that can be enjoyed around the world. I’d really like the challenge of doing something where the dialogue is really stripped back and it’s all about the cinema."

(Thanks to Chris!)

Davis also talked about the film to Brendan Kelly of the Montreal Gazette. "“Oh my God, the masterpiece of 2013, in my opinion... It’s riveting, it’s funny, it’s brilliant filmmaking. Imagine an Israeli version of the Coen brothers, mixed with early Brian De Palma, and Park Chan-wook. Also imagine Les Sept jours du talion re-imagined as the most sinister black comedy, but at the same time wickedly entertaining and funny. It’s just the perfect movie.”

'DISCOPATH' RECALLS ITALIAN GIALLO, JOHN CARPENTER, & BRIAN DE PALMA
Making its world premiere at the Fantasia fest on August 3rd will be Discopath, the feature debut of Renaud Gauthier, who sold his own home to finance the film, according to Marc Lamothe on the Fantasia web site. Gauthier served as director, screenwriter, art director, and music composer on Discopath, about a man who goes into a homicidal trance whenever he hears disco music. "Nostalgia is already [Gauthier's] stock in trade, his knack for evoking the smiles and styles of the ’70s, so it’s no surprise that his first feature is soaked in disco culture," Lamothe states in the notes. "But beyond the art direction, the mise en scene connects to the era by recalling the golden age of Italian giallo and lessons of masters like John Carpenter and Brian De Palma."

Computer Chess opened this past Wednesday in New York. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir calls it a "profound, peculiar work of genius."

Armond White writes of the film, "Mumblecore originator Bujalski has found the wit to break out from its conspicuous routines and make the genre’s most stylistically varied, artistically adventurous film with Computer Chess. Bujalski actually employs montage and style–idiosyncratic style–that goes past simply being unHollywood and creates its own uniquely nerd vision."

A. O. Scott of the New York Times calls it "peculiar and sneakily brilliant." And NPR's Ella Taylor writes, "The beguiling Computer Chess is about the dawn — one of many, but that's another story — of the tech revolution. It's also a reminder that you don't need state-of-the-art toys to make a formally playful comedy about man versus machine."

"But then, with little warning, things veer into markedly stranger territory, as the decadent, almost classic melodrama of the film's first two acts suddenly gives way to full-blown theatrical maximalism, with erotic liaisons erupting into garish displays of unholy abandon. The film quickly becomes a catalogue of aestheticized depravity, with Judith's cautionary-tale descent into hedonism expressed as a thick slice of exploitation cinema. From exaggeratedly steamy sex sessions to car windows smashed in rage, from laser-lit dens of nightlife sin to last-minute soap revelations (including an honest-to-goodness AIDS scare), [Tyler] Perry's Temptation appears across its last act more like Brian De Palma's Temptation, relishing the excess to such a pronounced degree that it's hard to tell what's meant to be taken ironically. Like De Palma, Perry embellishes every sensual detail, making a real show of lust and caution, blowing up the emotion and the style in equal measure. It results in a bizarre sort of friction—one that's very much jarring, but in a perverse way also rather mesmerizing—that simultaneously heightens the pleasure of the melodrama while severely reducing its credibility.

"For better or worse, Temptation isn't Good Deeds, though at its core it contains a similar honesty, its form is drastically wilder, careening into a stylistic ostentation at odds with both the heart of the material and the director's body of work. Perry has never been an especially extravagant visual stylist, but he does have a tendency to depict on-screen romance with a warmth and intimacy that borders on sensual (particularly where the steam of a shower is involved). Here that quality comes to practically define the aesthetic, pushed to an extreme that, once the prospect of violence enters the picture, makes it seem ripped from Dressed to Kill. (Because Temptation involves infidelity and stars black actors, it's been compared by some critics to Obsessed, but in terms of look and feel it's much closer to Obsession.) It's never clear, however, whether these over-the-top embellishments are meant to encourage or discourage identification, and it's hard to reconcile the conventional seriousness of the film's first two acts with the ostensible absurdity of its last act. If the point is to expand an already Christian-themed morality play to suitably biblical proportions, the gambit isn't so effective. And if the point, as it often is with De Palma, is to both relish and critique its own showy artifice (perhaps it's a demented vision of infidelity's worse-case scenario?), it isn't apparent how that meta-strategy relates to the apparent earnestness of the beginnings. But in any case, the last-act foray into veritable camp is certainly provocative, a quality with value of its own."

Randall King, Winnipeg Free Press
"Soderbergh, working from a script by Scott Z. Burns, delivers a genre mash-up, a murder mystery that strives to address the social ills that attend prescription pharmaceuticals. This has the capacity to be a hot-button movie playing on the all-too-pertinent link between violence and prescription meds. But Soderbergh seems to be gingerly avoiding head-on confrontation. Instead, he bottles a more mundane thriller of the type that might have appealed to Brian De Palma a decade or two earlier."

Jeff Myers, Metro Times
"From Soderbergh’s head-scratching opening homage to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby to a plot that, at first, seems to be a cautionary legal tale of big pharma abuses, Side Effects unexpectedly develops into a postmodern Hitchcockian thriller —which is actually akin to one of Brian De Palma’s chilly psychological puzzles. That’s an awful lot of cinematic referencing for one movie. But let me put a cherry on top, won’t you? With its eventual double-cross plot turns, paranoid wrong-man drama, and corrupt corporate subtext, Side Effects plays like a particularly nasty episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent had it been directed by Robert Altman."

Josh Board, Fox 5 San Diego
"Now, this is about all I will tell you regarding the plot. Even the trailers, and the stars of the movie on talk shows, have given away too much. I went in knowing nothing about it when I saw it last month. And I loved the way it went from a bit of an ethical dilemma to a psychological thriller. It was Hitchcock-light. More like Brian De Palma."

Al Alexander, The Patriot Ledger
"To even begin to describe the plot would be a disservice to anyone who has not yet basked in the film’s psychotic pleasures. Just know that nothing – and I mean, nothing – is what it seems, right up to the superbly composed final shots that come courtesy of Soderbergh, who serves as both editor and cinematographer (under the pseudonym of Peter Andrews) as well as director. It’s easily his finest – and most commercial – effort since Oceans 13. It’s also like nothing he’s ever done before, as he boldly treads into the domain normally reserved for masters of suspense like Hitchcock (think Vertigo) and Brian De Palma (Body Double, anyone?)."

Kurt Loder, Reason.com
"Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects is a grippingly 'Hitchcockian' movie, but not in the manner of, say, Brian De Palma, who blithely appropriated the master’s narrative elements and visual techniques for ’80s films like Dressed to Kill and Body Double. Soderbergh’s picture is something else, a bracingly lurid tale of a man trapped in a thickening web of circumstance—the sort of story that Hitchcock might well have wanted to tell himself. In the late director’s absence, Soderbergh, who over the course of 24 years has demonstrated a rare facility in a wide array of genres, proves to be just the man for the job."

Brian Tallerico, Hollywood Chicago
"Side Effects not only draws on Soderbergh’s career but has conscious echoes of Roman Polanski, Brian De Palma, and Alfred Hitchcock as well...

"That first act has echoes of Polanski’s wonderful, urban paranoia films like Repulsion as Soderbergh (under the pseudonym of Peter Andrews) shoots the 'wounded bird' of Mara often from below or above, heightening the claustrophobia of a city in which millions can feel alone despite being in such close proximity. Then the film twists and Soderbergh/Andrews & Burns bring a different, pulpier style that’s more reminiscent of De Palma when he so blatantly mimicked Hitchcock. Technically, it’s a marvelous piece of work as Soderbergh proves defter with his camera with every film."

Kate Erbland, Film School Rejects
"Yet, Side Effects seems more intent on toying with its viewers’ expectations than in really crafting its own internal cat-and-mouse game. The actual meat of its full storyline is unexpectedly trashy and tawdry, like some unholy mix of Brian De Palma film and Lifetime Original movie."