Also at this year's edition of Fantasia Fest, which takes place in Montreal, will be the world premiere of Phantom Of Winnipeg. While specific screening dates for this doc have not yet been revealed, the Swan Archives expects it to screen July 12, "and perhaps again on July 14." Here's the Fantasia description:

Just about everyone adores Brian De Palma’s 1974 glam rock comedy horror musical classic PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE. That wasn’t always so. Upon release, the film landed with a thud and quickly disappeared from screens everywhere – except for in the small and frigid Canadian city of Winnipeg, where local kids (shockingly between the ages of 9-13) turned the film into an enduring phenomenon with local box office grosses larger than JAWS! PHANTOM OF WINNIPEG (World Premiere) tells the story of the unique outsider fan community that sprung up around the film. It’s an exploration of the very DNA of fan culture itself told via the true-life stories of those fateful Winnipeg kids who just got it and the cast and creative team behind the original film who saw it all go down first-hand. Filmmakers Malcolm Ingram and Sean Stanley have spent years making this affectionate and wonderful doc, and Fantasia’s proud-as-Phoenix to be showcasing its long-coming World Premiere.

How did the idea of ​​"Domino" come about?

I wanted to write a thriller about how apparently unrelated incidents were interconnected, through a sort of domino effect. For example, a murder in Copenhagen may be linked to a terrorist attack in a small Spanish town. I also wanted to examine the primordial concepts of revenge and guilt. Before Brian got on board, the script was a darker and more intricate story. Some of my dominoes have been removed, creating a simpler and more linear plot that best suited his vision of the film.

What research did you do for this story?

In today's society, just follow the news on the news to find a story like this. Terrorist attacks are not only documented by news agencies, but also by terrorists themselves, so news and propaganda often intersect. Dozens of books on European terrorism have been written - and I've read several. I also spoke to specialists in international terrorism, such as Thomas Hegghammer, who gave me invaluable advice.

Are there details in the script that reflect your Scandinavian background?

As a Norwegian, it was natural for me to use Scandinavia as setting for some parts of the film. Copenhagen is the most international and photogenic city among Scandinavian cities - and since Nikolaj lives in the city, it was a breeze to set the story there. Working with Danish producer Michael Schønnemann was another reason for Copenhagen to play an important role in the story.

What are the dangers of writing about terrorism?

Writing about terrorism, partly from the point of view of terrorists, is a potential minefield. Terrorists, as instigators of violence, are the antagonists by nature. But in Domino the protagonists are imperfect and therefore the boundaries between good and evil, right and wrong, are not outlined.

What was it like working with Brian De Palma?

Working with a legendary director like Brian De Palma was an incredibly interesting privilege. Although I felt the need to adapt my existing script to his vision of the film, he always made sure that the heart and soul of the story remained intact. He is very sharp and analytical, and a true gentleman in the creative process.

Back in 1981, Kael herself wrote in of the freshly-released Blow Out in The New Yorker:

If you know De Palma’s movies, you have seen earlier sketches of many of the characters and scenes here, but they served more limited—often satirical—purposes. Blow Out isn’t a comedy or a film of the macabre; it involves the assassination of the most popular candidate for the presidency, so it might be called a political thriller, but it isn’t really a genre film. For the first time, De Palma goes inside his central character—Travolta as Jack, a sound effects specialist. And he stays inside. He has become so proficient in the techniques of suspense that he can use what he knows more expressively. You don’t see set pieces in Blow Out—it flows, and everything that happens seems to go right to your head. It’s hallucinatory, and it has a dreamlike clarity and inevitability, but you’ll never make the mistake of thinking that it’s only a dream. Compared with Blow Out, even the good pictures that have opened this year look dowdy. I think De Palma has sprung to the place that Altman achieved with films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville and that Coppola reached with the two Godfather movies—that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is an artist’s vision. And Travolta, who appeared to have lost his way after Saturday Night Fever, makes his own leap—right back to the top, where he belongs. Playing an adult (his first), and an intelligent one, he has a vibrating physical sensitivity like that of the very young Brando.

Beginning with a rooftop chase that evokes Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the latest from Brian De Palma plunges Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s hapless Copenhagan cop into a complex plot involving CIA skullduggery courtesy agent Guy Pearce and high-tech jihadists with machine-gun-mounted livestreaming cameras. A go-for-broke genre exercise featuring stunning set pieces at the Netherlands Film Festival and a Spanish bullfight, which finds the ever-provocative De Palma exploring the correlation between terrorism and filmmaking. “The death-dealing, all-voyeurism-all-the-time world that De Palma has been imagining in some form or another since the late ’60s, has, he recognizes, finally come into actual being, and it’s worse than he, or anyone, ever imagined.”—Glenn Kenny, The New York Times

In 2002, ranking De Palma's Femme Fatale at number 3 on his top 10 film list for Salon that year, Taylor wrote, "As a visual storyteller Brian De Palma is without equal in contemporary moviemaking. Inevitably, his films are dismissed by critics and audiences who have become too lazy to process visual information. (Here's a decoder: When a critic describes a De Palma film as 'incoherent' it usually means he was too lazy to follow it.)"

DOMINO is Brian De Palma’s “Fuck You” to #RottenTomatoes, one of many social media trends in De Palma’s cross-hairs. Through a recurring motif, he restores the Fresh Tomato to its now-perverted essence. To paraphrase Godard: Tomato is “red.” Did anyone else clock the first tomato in De Palma’s DOMINO? It imbues the fruit, the ripe red, with connotations of desire and guilt that motivates—and connects—the film’s expressionist panoply of law enforcers, vigilante revengers, and global terrorism actors. The rogues gallery of #FakeNews hacks and cyber-climbers aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes commits a form of cultural terrorism by dismissing De Palma’s vitality and reducing criticism and cinema to produce. The middle finger is mightier than the thumb.

Much to say. But nobody is paying me to say it.

Example: Ever since Verhoeven’s BLACK BOOK (and then her daring portrayal in RACE), I have wanted De Palma to cast Carice van Houten. She imbues the role here with complex feeling, disturbing the spectator’s response to her capacity for action. She aims her righteous right-leg kicks for the testes (“Therapy,” she jokes) and her gun for single-minded vengeance, always registering the moral implications with Adjani-like imminence, even when crossing paths with the woman she betrayed.

It’s a beautiful film—now available on iTunes.

This is a second-tier, non-event film (a commendable rejuvenation for De Palma), and its brisk narrative moves as if on impulse. De Palma’s mastery of pace and composition makes the briefest image and sharpest edit count. When Christian confronts Ezra, their initial alarm is conveyed through European/African facial contrasts — film noir close-ups burning with sociological dread — that, thanks to cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, raise the movie’s temperature. Each character’s desperation and personal motivation are vivid; the global nightmare is conveyed with such quick efficiency that Domino plays like a B-movie dream of a great De Palma film. (The media’s hostility toward it suggests that Domino — which dares pinpoint Islamic terrorism — isn’t PC enough.)

For various reasons owing to our political and moral disorientation, it seems impossible for contemporary American filmmakers to deal with national or global crises. (Note that Domino’s non-American cast mostly speaks in American idioms.) But De Palma’s formidable technique helps him puzzle out this artistic dilemma ahead of his peers. His signature use of split screens throughout Domino shows such assurance and depth that it relays our split moral consciousness. Domino proves that De Palma’s relation to new media includes coming to terms with the horror of ISIS beheading videos — the new media depersonalization that is inseparable from the private commemoration in cellphone photo swipes and facial-recognition technology that destroys all privacy. That concern animates every scene. It’s total illumination of our digital-age crisis.

De Palma’s 2007 film Redacted was a predictably sour retort to George Bush’s continuation of the Iraq War. De Palma couldn’t get over the cynicism he developed in the countercultural Sixties, and his knee-jerk liberalism forced him to shortchange his sympathy with the film’s soldier characters, unforgivably showing them as moral criminals. With screenwriter Petter Skavlan, DePalma’s Domino premise updates Eisenhower’s 1950s domino theory so that the warning against Communism’s spread becomes an allegory for this century’s spread of rampant, even murderous, incivility.

In this way, Domino responds to the post-9/11 political malaise (as well as professional difficulties) that caused De Palma’s artistic slump. That he eventually equates Islamic terrorism to common human vengeance reveals his unfortunate, facile cynicism. Australian actor Guy Pearce plays a bad Yankee CIA agent whose exit line is as trite as his villainous Southern accent: “We’re Americans; we read your emails.” This juvenile political streak is at odds with Domino’s most movingly humane and cinematic moments: A road-movie motif from Godard’s Made in U.S.A., a cliff-hanger motif from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and a harrowing, self-mocking film-festival red-carpet motif from De Palma’s last great film, Femme Fatale.

These subconscious cineaste references intrude on the global nightmare as evidence that De Palma himself — unlike most recently weaponized pop-culture figures — might be rethinking the cultural decline that has become unmistakable in our politics, but especially in our media habits. That’s Domino’s real theme.

Glenn Kenny, New York Times
‘Domino’ Review: All Voyeurism, All the Time
"In Brian De Palma’s new film, a personal revenge story line is subsumed by horrific visions of television-friendly acts of terror."

The Copenhagen cop Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a pleasant fellow but not a terribly good police officer. Leaving his apartment to go on an early morning shift with his partner and pal Lars (Soren Malling), and distracted by the nude woman trying to get him to stay, Christian forgets to take his gun with him. Later, at a crime scene — a grisly torture-murder — he borrows his partner’s gun. This allows the fearsomely bearded suspect, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), to fatally assault that partner. During a rooftop chase that looks like the opening of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” reimagined as a vintage Doublemint gum ad, Christian manages to lose the borrowed weapon, too.

Under other circumstances, the director, Brian De Palma, might have squeezed some mordant humor out of his protagonist’s ineptitude. De Palma’s career took off with the paranoid comedies “Greetings” and “Hi, Mom!” five decades back, and his filmography has encompassed horror, crime and other genres, all delivered with a sardonic edge. Even blockbuster exercises such as “Mission: Impossible” (1996) managed an acerbic undercurrent.

But “Domino,” arriving here after the director complained in at least one interview about the way the film’s producers treated him, isn’t all that unified with respect to the values it contains and excludes.

The movie shows almost no interest in a personal payback plot (the script is by Petter Skavlan), even after Christian is joined by Alex (Carice van Houten), who was closer to Lars than poor Christian is able to guess. As for Ezra, he’s nabbed by the glib C.I.A. chess master Joe Martin (Guy Pearce, having some fun) and compelled to continue killing. Shaving both his beard and his head, Ezra tracks the same jihadists that Christian and Alex find themselves pursuing.

And what jihadists they are. One of them has a machine-gun-mounted video camera with sensors recording both the shooter in close-up and the victims, and feeding the images to a split-screen display. The scene in which she takes the weapon/camera ensemble to the Netherlands Film Festival is quite a set piece.

De Palma can’t realize all the elaborate effects he clearly wanted (the film’s climax occurs at a bullfight that’s conspicuously not crowded). But his direction often compensates with B-movie energy, particularly when he’s able to concentrate on his perverse vision. The death-dealing, all-voyeurism-all-the-time world that De Palma has been imagining in some form or another since the late ’60s, has, he recognizes, finally come into actual being, and it’s worse than he, or anyone, ever imagined. At times during “Domino,” the director seems practically giddy about it.

Rated R for language, themes, violence, a paranoid vision of the world come true.

Now, De Palma has been issuing warnings about his new film Domino, a Danish production that he claims didn't originate with him and was the most horrible movie set he has ever experienced. And plenty of evidence of a patch job is on display here, especially as the film actively yawns its way through a muddled plot about the conflict between Danish police and the CIA over an ISIS mastermind. It is both thrillingly and painfully obvious which sequences pique De Palma's interest and which ones don't, but fans of the director's work might be surprised by how much of his sensibility survives intact.

Always an underrated satirist, De Palma locks into the concept of terrorist-as-filmmaker and the careful staging and orchestration that goes into turning beheadings and suicide bombings into propagandistic art. With cameras attached to machine guns and remote-controlled drones, and earpieces distributed among his crew, ISIS leader Salah Al Din (Mohammed Azaay) is not much different from Francis Ford Coppola sitting in front of a bank of monitors in his trailer on One From the Heart, issuing directives to his cast and crew. For De Palma, the movies can be a deadly art.

Only Brian De Palma would care so much about the filmmaking techniques of a terrorist group. As with the “Be Black, Baby” scene in Hi, Mom!, the use of cameras and camera angles in Snake Eyes, and the vérité style of Redacted, De Palma is most fascinated here by the use of media as a tool for communication, the visual arts as a weapon. Passion, one of his most concupiscent films,was the first film De Palma made in the age of social media, and technology/social media played an integral role in the narrative, and again, in Domino, social media has the potential to be poisonous, to be propaganda. The phone-as-camera also features prominently in both films. (One thinks of the teenage De Palma avatar in Dressed to Kill uses technology to figure out who killed his mother, or Travolta’s sound man creating a film to solve a murder.) At his best, De Palma is the consummate trash man, crafting out of puerile material some of the most delirious images in American movies. His characters have met untimely ends in high school gymnasiums, in elevators, at boxing matches; his victims and maladaptives are chopped up, maimed, shot, stabbed, immolated, electrocuted, exploded by telekinesis. In Domino, De Palma has fun with a lethal camera drone, which is one of the most on-brand things the filmmaker has ever done. Movies have the power to propagandize, and they have the power to kill.