In the book itself, Phipps spends a couple of paragraphs on Brian De Palma's Snake Eyes:

In August, Snake Eyes debuted to an audience of summer moviegoers hungry for another Cage action film. Instead, they got a twisty, recursively structured thriller directed by Brian De Palma featuring some jaw-dropping moments of cinematic showmanship—including a seemingly unbroken thirteen-minute opening shot that whisks viewers through the belly and onto the floor of an Atlantic City arena playing host to a heavyweight championship bout—and a climax that doesn’t work.

Working again with a master filmmaker of the generation that emerged alongside Francis Ford Coppola, Cage offers a vivid performance—one filled with the sort of manic gestures and explosive line readings that would resurface in later work—as a gleefully corrupt cop who stumbles his way toward redemption after discovering that a childhood friend (Gary Sinise) has masterminded a conspiracy. Though Snake Eyes had much to recommend it, particularly for longtime admirers of De Palma and Cage, collections of compelling elements that fail to gel into coherent movies rarely become hits. Hampered by middling reviews—in the LA Weekly, Manohla Dargis described it as “running on fumes” after its memorable opening—and bad word of mouth, it struggled at the box office.

Snake Eyes (1998) ***

Sold as another Cage action film, this twisty Brian De Palma thriller confused moviegoers expecting more blood and bullets. That the film, even on its own terms, has problems didn’t help, but Cage has fun playing a cop who loves being on the take and who enjoys everything corruption brings him—until he has to face a moral reckoning.

Most people would call the cops after finding out that their landlord is illegally spying on his residents’ every move, but not Sharon Stone in Sliver. Stone’s character, Carly Norris, is a buttoned-down book editor who specializes in tell-alls and unabashedly elbows someone aside at a cocktail party to get a better look at a couple having sex without the curtains drawn in a nearby building. A wolfish grin stretches across her face as one of the guests yelps, “She’s a voyeur! She can’t get enough!” No one would ever accuse the erotic thriller of being too subtle. Carly likes to watch, and so does her eventual lover, Zeke Hawkins (William Baldwin), who lives a few floors down in the Manhattan high-rise she just moved into and who, it turns out, also owns the building. Zeke, in fact, likes to watch so much that he has had all the apartments rigged with hidden cameras, the live feeds transmitting to a state-of-the-art room in the back of his bachelor pad.

The first time Zeke shows Carly his surveillance chamber, she storms out in disgust. Then, unable to help herself, she comes back, settling in for a long session of spying on her oblivious neighbors, so enrapt that she forgets to eat. The ability to commune with the illicit footage in an intimate setting, flipping between channels, almost matters more than what she’s seeing. It takes hours before she figures out that Zeke has a tape of the two of them fucking, and that they can watch themselves while fooling around. Basic Instinct may have secured Stone’s place as the icy blonde queen of the erotic thriller in 1992, but it was Sliver, made a year after, that highlighted a fundamental truth about the genre — that it was as obsessed with home video as the customers who enabled it to become such a phenomenon in the 1980s and ’90s.

The erotic thriller famously brought a flurry of sex and death to the multiplex, but its existence really owes everything to home viewing — to late-night cable, down-market sequels, and direct-to-video offerings. While Blockbuster refused to carry porn, it would carry a copy of In the Cold of the Night, starring Jeff Lester, Shannon Tweed, and some off-label use of a container of decorative marbles. The internet had yet to really make its arrival, but the home theater had become commonplace, and the erotic thriller thrived in private, on Skinemax or via VHS clamshells squirreled home to be watched on suburban living room screens with the curtains drawn. So it’s fitting that the genre was just as in thrall with the idea of home viewing as its primary audience. Scopophilia and surveillance were two of its regular preoccupations, but so was the possibility of having illicit recordings on tape — as leverage for blackmail, as stroke material, or simply as something that can be kept and revisited whenever the urge strikes.

There was a novelty to that control, to not just be able to watch but to rewatch. The roots of the erotic thriller are in film noir and Hitchcock, with all the subtext said out loud. Brian De Palma’s proto-classic of the genre, Body Double, is a jubilantly debased remix of Rear Window and Vertigo with added tits, with an invertebrate Craig Wasson as struggling actor Jake Scully, who obsesses over a woman he believes may be in danger without ever being able to spring into action to save her. But Michael Powell’s 1960 shocker, Peeping Tom, about a man who films the murders he commits, feels just as essential as a forerunner. To Mark (Carl Boehm), the wretched loner of a main character, the violence itself is less significant than the celluloid record he creates, and he carries a camera with him everywhere, often surreptitiously filming. He may not have the benefit of ’90s-era technology, but like Zeke in Sliver, he secretly owns the building he lives in and gets romantically involved with one of his tenants. And like Zeke, Mark has a back room where, using a projector rather than a close-circuit television, he obsessively reviews the surreptitious footage he has shot, as though the ability to watch in private gives him more control over the world outside.

Peeping Tom may be about a character who gets off on the fear on his victims’ faces, but the erotic thriller usually aims for the more quotidian pleasures of voyeurism. Zeke zooms in to watch the oblivious Carly masturbate in the bath while believing herself to be alone. Will (Andrew Stevens), the meathead hero of Night Eyes, totes a VHS cassette of his unknowing client home to watch the moment when, while having sex with someone else, she locks eyes with the camera she doesn’t know is there. A direct-to-video release that spawned a whole gauze curtains–heavy franchise, Night Eyes is about a security guard hired by a rock star to install a system of hidden recording devices in his house in order to get fodder for his lawyer on his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Nikki (Tanya Roberts). Nikki knows that Will has been brought on to protect her, but not that he’s being paid to surveil and inform on her, and before long he’s falling in love with her by way of those tapes — his own DIY softcore rentals — while wallowing in guilt. Then he finds himself appearing on one of them after acceding to her request to enact a rape fantasy, and understands that the unfiltered truth they seemed to offer is just an illusion when the footage is used against him.

"Dressed to Kill," Brian De Palma's homage to "Psycho," casts Michael Caine in the largely thankless role of the psychiatrist whose patient is murdered and then gets drawn into the case when suspicion falls on another of his patients.

This is a tricky one. On first viewing, Caine's performance in "Dressed To Kill" seems a little odd and a bit wooden. It's only once you watch the film again that you understand what he's doing. He's essentially playing a role within a role, putting on a veneer of respectability that covers a sinister secret. De Palma makes excellent use of mirrors throughout, hinting at Caine's fractured psyche. However, Caine never tips his hand. It's a performance that takes on more and more layers once you know the plot, and it's a credit to Caine that the reveal is never laughable. Be warned though, the film was released in 1980, and some of the plot twists are more than a little problematic today.

I've always been inspired by some of the films and themes of Hitchcock, also visually, in videos, of course. But recently I became interested in one of his most ardent imitators and admirers in film, Brian De Palma. The video for "Cut" is obviously inspired by De Palma's Body Double, which I just got to screen and present at an old cinema in Oslo. It's so outrageous, that movie. Stupid and clever and sleazy and sophisticated in equal measures. I like that, and it captures the theme of performative love and seduction really well, which is a major theme on Avatars Of Love.

Bill Maher: What kind of movies do you hate? Like, is there a type or kind… like, for me, I will watch romantic comedies – sometimes I only want to watch a romantic comedy – but I do find them… [laughing] they try my patience. And I don’t have a lot of respect. It’s a very… I guess the old-school ones with, like, Spencer Tracy…

Quentin Tarantino: Right, with Claudette Colbert, or something…

BM: Katherine Hepburn…

QT: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BM: I mean, were they great?

QT: Well, the ones that were really funny kind of fall more into the category of screwball comedy. Which is where the romantic comedies of today came from.

BM: But it’s always a man and a woman, right?

QT: Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. And there’s a flirtation and there’s…

BM: You mean, like, It Happened One Night, and…

QT: Well, that’s a good example of one. Bringing Up Baby is a good example of one.

BM: What is, the Streisand - Ryan O’Neal movie…

QT: What’s Up, Doc? Yeah.

BM: …is a great one. Is that a remake of a…

QT: No, it’s not a remake…

BM: But it’s a tribute.

QT: Yeah, it’s kind of a paraphrase remake. All right, umm.. a special genre unto itself. It’s a paraphrase remake of the movie Bringing Up Baby.

BM: Right – Cary Grant…

QT: Yeah, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.

BM: And Jimmy Stewart. Oh, no, that’s Philadelphia…

QT: That’s Philadelphia Story.

BM: Right.

QT: Okay, but the thing is like, a paraphrase remake is like the relationship that Dressed To Kill has with Psycho.

BM: Oh.

QT: Where it’s like, okay, so it’s not a remake of Psycho…

BM: I see…

QT: But…

BM: Right…

QT: There’s no way you’re watching Dressed To Kill and not thinking about Psycho.

BM: [Laughs]

QT: But the director knows that you’re watching Dressed To Kill thinking about Psycho, so he can actually hit Psycho points because you’re on the same wavelength now. And now he’s kind of remaking the movie without remaking it. Just doing his own twist on it.

BM: Right. I think it’s called a rip-off, but…

QT: No no no no, when it’s that done, when it’s done like that… okay, there’s “rip-off,” but Dressed To Kill and Psycho, no, he’s riffing.

Francis Ford Coppola has four films in the top ten: The Godfather (#1), The Godfather, Part II (#4), Apocalypse Now (#6), and The Conversation (#8).

Brian De Palma's Carrie makes the list at number 50, having appeared on ten of the individual lists. Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now also appeared on ten individual lists, but is ranked at #49 -- it seems mostly coincidence that #49 and #50 both feature scores by Pino Donaggio (three other films surrounding these two films in the ranking also appeared on precisely ten lists). Our old friend David Greven has Carrie on his list of 15 films, as well as three other De Palma films:

David Greven (Professor/USC)

THE GODFATHER, PART II
3 WOMEN
AUTUMN SONATA
DEATH IN VENICE
THE STORY OF ADELE H
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
KLUTE
TAXI DRIVER
THE EXORCIST
OBSESSION
CARRIE
THE FURY
SISTERS
IT'S ALIVE
DOG DAY AFTERNOON

Armond White (National Review)

Nashville
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Last Tango in Paris
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Godfather, Part II
Mean Streets
1900
Taxi Driver
MASH
Ryan’s Daughter
The Warriors
The Godfather
Sounder
The Fury
Women in Love

Tina Hassannia (Slant Magazine)

Celine and Julie Go Boating
Still Life
F for Fake
Badlands
Don’t Look Now
The Brood
Solaris
California Split
Hi, Mom!
Real Life

Kevin Laforest (Extra Beurre)

Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Annie Hall
Apocalypse Now
A Clockwork Orange
The Godfather
The Godfather: Part II
Halloween
Jaws
The Long Goodbye
Phantom of the Paradise
Rocky
Stalker
Suspiria
Taxi Driver
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Raising Cain (1992)

De Palma has always known exactly what to do with the effete menace exuded by actor John Lithgow, particularly in early masterworks like Obsession and Blow Out. De Palma’s go-to tactic with Lithgow? Cast him as a bad guy, and make him as creepy as possible. In Cain, the veteran actor comes completely unglued, playing a respected psychologist who is revealed to be quite dangerous when he learns of his wife’s infidelity.

...to date, it is simultaneously one of the horniest and most elegant Hitchcock homages that this master craftsman has ever given us.

The “Be Black, Baby!” sequence is an uncomfortable, barn-burning stunner, and almost surely one of the more purely provocative sequences that De Palma has ever committed to film.

Many day-one De Palma heads have this retro oddity in their personal top five, and for good reason: from a standpoint of pure visual technique and jaw-dropping cinematic invention, Phantom can feel, as you watch it, like nothing less than one of the coolest American movies ever made.

Body Double is, yes, vulgar, ridiculous, offensive, and pretty much every other pejorative you could think to throw at it. It’s also by far De Palma’s most under-valued work on the whole: a brutal vivisection of voyeurism, entitlement, male ego, and the pomposity of Hollywood, disguised as Dressed To Kill 2.0. Even when the movie’s heart is scurrilous and perverse, its technique is so assured as to be downright classical in its composition.

On March 18th, 1993, a group of young men from Lakewood, California, who collectively went by the self-bestowed name of the "Spur Posse" were arrested by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Their crimes - and their response to it - would become major news in the United States at the time; charged with an array of sex crimes, these assaults were all linked to a 'game' the members had constructed which used a point system to create a competitive environment where these crimes garnered the assailant a numerical value, all leading up to the grotesque idea that there would be a 'winner'. The more rapes, the more points. Prosecutors dropped the case bar one single charge because they felt unable to prove these encounters were not consensual, and the police failed to pursue even statutory rape charges despite one of the survivors only being ten years old.

This was a long time before #MeToo, but there are echoes here of far too many future cases that we have seen since, and of course that existed long before this case itself. Why this particular news story caused such a storm is perhaps as much to do with the high class status of the Spur Posse - they were football players, the golden boys - as it did the horrific crimes they committed all in the name of this "game".

This might sound like a strange way to approach Katt Shea's The Rage: Carrie 2, but when you know this story, it comes as zero surprise to learn that the Spur Posse case was as much (if not more) an influence on the critically lambasted sequel to Brian De Palma's valorized 1976 original. That comparing the sequel to the original has remained the primary model for assessing this film is perhaps stating the obvious; if the title alone doesn't encourage us enough to do this, then the film itself goes to some pretty significant lengths to remind us of the original in some of its key moments, sometimes going a far as to replicate iconic scenes and images.

Original footage from De Palma's 1976 film of Sissy Spacek's famous Carrie even appears in The Rage, in a red-tinted flashback of the famous "plug it up scene". Spacek turned down an offer to appear in the sequel, but she did grant permission for this footage to be reused. However, Amy Irving does appear as a relatively central character, revamping her character, Sue Snell. Here, she now works at the school where the sequel takes place. A loose reconfiguring of Betty Buckley's gym teacher Miss Desjardin from the first film in many ways, she also differs significantly as she is much more overtly a champion for the victimized girls in the film, especially protagonist, Rachel Lang (Emily Bergl).

Rachel is Carrie's step-sister; they share the same father (who seems to have a thing for religious fanatics), which in itself is interesting because it renders Rachel and Carrie's telekinesis - a gift they both share - as not only hereditary, but passed down through the male family line. Violence, then, despite the centrality of the women characters here, is ultimately framed as inherently connected to the masculine. These girls have not just got enormous supernatural powers, but the violence intrinsic to that in both of their cases is something they literally got from a man; their propensity for violence, then, is deemed monstrous not only because it holds the potential for unrestrained destruction, but also because they are women who have what is biologically defined as being something emphatically masculine.

Rachel learns of her relationship to Carrie from Sue, whose guilt over Carrie's death and the carnage associated with it propel her to investigate Rachel's similar background with a demented religious kook for a mother. But Rachel and Carrie - and their stories - are as different as they are similar. Rachel's mother, for instance, is institutionalized very early in the film, leaving Rachel to grow up in an uncaring foster home (for the music fans amongst you, her stepfather is played by the iconic John Doe from the killer LA punk band X). While Carrie was meek and frightened, Rachel is tough; Pauline Kael once famously described Spacek's Carrie as looking like a "squashed frog", while Rachel is a tomboy (when one of the quasi-Spur Posse ringleaders invites her on a date early in the film, she unhesitatingly rejects him, telling him she's not interested "because I'm a dyke”. He doesn't pause to disbelieve it).

"Plenty of films are less coy about bloodshed and whole genres are built on gore. It would be easy to fill every spot on this list with slashers and gialli, creating a similar impression to the elevator doors opening in The Shining (1980).

"Although there does seem to be a theme of sadness, loss, violence and death to movies that make the most unabashed use of red, it is also the colour of passion. Sometimes primal feelings are too much for gentle or defeated people to confront. Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar Wai use red in their production designs to express what their characters cannot.

"To lighten the mood: enter the scarlet seductress. 'She is always alluring,' says Catherine Bray in her Inside Cinema video essay, Women in Red. One such siren adds sparkle to this list: it’s Marilyn Monroe, the greatest bombshell who ever lived in her star-making role.

"The Red Balloon is a seemingly simple children’s film that won an Academy Award in 1956. Its use of red in both visual and emotional terms is the gold standard."

Kaufman's list is inspired by the 50th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) is included:

Pig’s blood, a red convertible, Sissy Spacek’s hair, wine-coloured candles and a pale pink dress seen as red through a fundamentalist mother’s eyes. These are some of the key ingredients of Carrie. Brian De Palma adapted Stephen King’s novel, which is one of the saddest horror tales in existence. Humiliation and rejection push Carrie White (white is an invitation to red), the shy loner with telekinetic powers, towards a finale of destruction. This bursts out of her as the culmination of feelings so powerful that they cause literal combustions.

Lured into a sweet and short-lived feeling of belonging at high-school prom, only to have pig’s blood poured on her during a moment in the limelight, Carrie snaps, pushed to the edge by her violent mother. Hers is not a maniacal-laughter mode of vengeance; it is grief-fuelled. The red that has dripped steadily since the opening scene, where she gets her period, erupts in a torrent that makes a mockery of the fire trucks that arrive on the scene too late.

As Brian De Palma would do later in Carrie (1976), Powell and Pressburger (the filmmaking duo known as The Archers) complement their use of visceral vermillion with the natural locks of a red-headed woman. Moira Shearer plays the ill-fated Vicky, an ingenue ballet-dancer beckoned under the oppressive wing of dance impresario Boris Lermontov (a brilliantly villainous Anton Walbrook, who is awarded the most memorable lines). Vicky is cast in the ballet of The Red Shoes, about a bewitched pair of ballet shoes that cause their wearer to dance themselves to death. The score is written by a young composer, also a redhead, and they fall in love, to the disapproval of Lermontov.

When Vicky is invited into a room to be offered the lead part, each figure of authority is surrounded by a splash of red, a portent of things to come. The Archers make a motif of red, white and blue, dressing Shearer, with her porcelain skin and auburn hair, in a colour wheel of blues.

This idea of sort of figuring-it-out-as-we-go-along seems to have stuck with Tom Cruise and his collaborators throughout the Mission: Impossible franchise. Today at The Hollywood Reporter, Kim Masters highlights the "perhaps surprisingly improvisational approach to filmmaking" taken by Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie:

M:I 7‘s release date has been pushed four times; it’s now set for July 2023. By holding on to the film as a work in progress while working on the eighth, Cruise and his writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie, ensure that Paramount won’t have much luck imposing budget restrictions on what is allegedly the final installment in the franchise. It also gives Cruise — who has creative control — flexibility with respect to the cliffhanger ending of M:I 7.

With hundreds of millions on the line, says a knowledgeable source, Cruise and McQuarrie take a perhaps surprisingly improvisational approach to filmmaking. McQuarrie first encountered Cruise on the 2008 film Valkyrie, which McQuarrie co-wrote and co-produced. He started collaborating on the Mission movies when he went to work on the script for the fourth installment, 2011’s Ghost Protocol, mid-production. He directed the fifth, 2015’s Rogue Nation, during which he figured out the third act only in the middle of shooting. The sixth installment, 2018’s Fallout, involved more of the same budget-fracturing spontaneity. This unpredictable approach is Cruise exercising the power he’s accrued from bringing in $3.6 billion in box office starring as Ethan Hunt over three decades.

The notion that a studio can control spending on a Cruise movie is dismissed by executives who have been in the trenches with him. One says a studio can only hope to “influence” Cruise and McQuarrie. “Tom looks at [the money] he delivers to the studio,” says another. “Why wouldn’t you go do whatever you want? Who’s going to tell you not to?” These executives say Cruise is driven by his own perfectionism. “It’s not always in the best interest of the budget, but he is incredibly detailed and willing to put in an enormous amount of time and effort on every aspect,” says a source on M:I 7. “The guy does give every ounce of his being to this endeavor,” confirms another.

The still-unfinished M:I 7 has already hit a breathtaking $290 million budget, with tax incentives. Cruise and McQuarrie did a little work on 8 as 7 got underway — enough to say they had started the film — but shooting on 8 is underway now. Sources say Cruise has persuaded Brian Robbins, the new president and CEO of Paramount Pictures, to give him more money to finish the seventh film and make the eighth, arguing (with some justification) that inflation has driven up expenses.

No one can be blamed for COVID-19, or for the lousy luck that had M:I 7 start its shoot in northern Italy, hit hard early in the pandemic. Ultimately, both Cruise and McQuarrie — neither of whom was believed to be vaccinated at the time — contracted the virus, according to sources. McQuarrie’s illness was so severe that he was hospitalized in London, a source says. (Why the two weren’t vaccinated isn’t clear, but in Cruise’s case, it apparently was not because Scientology has taken a position against it, as some in town have speculated. Sources familiar with the organization’s policy say it has left the decision up to members.) Neither Cruise nor McQuarrie responded to a request for comment.