"DeLillo’s language is severe and enchantingly precise; every individual in his world is a philosopher lecturing to no one but themselves. His book is set in the Eighties and concerns a miniaturised apocalypse triggered by a cloud of chemicals – not an obvious fit, then, for Baumbach, whose films (Marriage Story; The Meyerowitz Stories) largely concern the most intricate neuroses of modern-day, self-branded intellectuals. But there is nothing more self-centred, perhaps, than a fear of death. And even the director’s most likeable characters, such as Greta Gerwig’s freewheeling protagonist of Frances Ha, suffer from acute narcissism. The effect here is that his White Noise comes across far more sentimentally than DeLillo likely ever intended. Yet its forgiving nature is oddly comforting."

After a couple of paragraphs about the film's story, Loughrey continues:

Baumbach has omitted one of the most famous passages of DeLillo’s book, in which his characters visit the “Most Photographed Barn in America”. The author uses it to theorise that our reality is now so documented and commodified that it ceases to exist as an independent state. We’re never looking at the barn as it is, but only at the barn as it’s been photographed. Rather than try and clumsily translate the passage onto film, Baumbach instead finds his own way to integrate that idea into the very language of his adaptation. White Noise, therefore, swings wildly between cinematic allusions – there are car chases, hints of Spielbergian wonderment, touches of David Lynch’s dream logic, and Brian De Palma’s lurid thrillers. It ends with a musical dance sequence set to LCD Soundsystem.

Much like the “Most Photographed Barn in America”, these references create distance. They help us face the mortal terrors of White Noise with a little more ease. The same could be said of the Gladney’s familiar rituals, from their supermarket trips to their daily verbal pile-ups. But Baumbach also suggests these might be nothing but harmful delusions, ultimately making us blind to fate. The spectacle of society may be our only comfort, but could it also herald our ultimate doom?

Baumbach kneads the themes of DeLillo: the disintegration of the family by media saturation, the anguish of death, the appetite of the society of the spectacle for chaos and destruction (a thought for Nope). Serious, therefore, but treated in the tone of a savage farce.

The comic power and poetic fury of the source material allow Baumbach to burst the seams of his cinema. We think at times of the azimuted comedies of David O. Russell: the same taste for the ruptures of tone, the toupee actors, the "zinzinerie" cartoon. Where we remember that Noah Baumbach is also the co-screenwriter of Madagascar 3: Kisses from Europe… The film, which begins as an intellectual comedy, turns halfway through to an indie variation on Spielberg's War of the Worlds ( yes, yes), before playing it 80s thriller, with visual quotes from Brian De Palma in support. It's a lot, probably too much, for a single film, but Baumbach here portrays a man who counts the days he has left to live, and it's as if he himself counted the films what remains for him to do. And that he took advantage of it to shoot several at the same time, put in thrillers and SF adventures that he has never done, and will probably never do. Some will probably find it a bit indigestible. The rest will nod and smile during the fun end credits, punctuated by an unreleased LCD Soundsystem song, "New Rumba Body". Noah Baumbach asked musician James Murphy to write "a joyous song about death". That's also a good way to describe the movie.

American reviewers who praise Decision to Leave apparently welcome its cynicism and exoticism as something missing from U.S. movies (the same reason Spike Lee did an inferior remake of Park’s masochistic underworld thriller Oldboy). Those reviewers who prefer Decision to Leave over Brian De Palma’s wonderfully complex Femme Fatale (2002) — a film that moved from social transgression to sexual maneuvering to spiritual redemption — show a taste for Millennial decadence. Decision to Leave’s glossy aesthetics are corrupt and sinister.

"In 1976, I went to a high-school prom," says Tim Burton, with a tone far from nostalgic. "It was the year Carrie came out. I felt like a male Carrie at that prom. I felt that feeling of having to be there but not being part of it." He gives a big, rueful smile. "They don't leave you, those feelings, as much as you want them to go."

We tell this little story not to make your day a bit sadder, but to illustrate just why Burton decided to direct Wednesday, his first TV project. Despite years of fans clamouring for Burton - cinema's patron saint of the macabre - to make an Addams Family project of some sort, he has never really been interested. It was only when presented with the chance to tell the story of a lonely teenager who hates school and doesn't understand her parents that he felt he'd found something that click-clicked. "You know," he grins, "Wednesday and I have the same worldview."

In his 2015 memoir Behind These Eyes Such Sweet Madness Lies (My Life On and Off the Stage), Maggart recalls taking a break from that film to work on Dressed To Kill:

I worked six weeks straight on Christmas Evil, six days a week. During that time, I had a two-day window that I used to work on the film, Dressed To Kill starring Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, and Angie Dickinson, directed by Brian De Palma. I was not in great shape for those two days, but we filmed one short scene and a second long scene with me and Nancy Allen in a hotel room. In the scene, Nancy was playing the hooker, and I was her John… a John who only wanted to talk. I wasn’t aware that the scene had not made the cut until I saw it in a theater. I had nice billing, but my on-screen time was about ten seconds. By itself, the cut scene was a good scene, but it did not belong in the film. Most of the scenes in the film were short and well-paced. Nancy lobbied to have it put back in for the European market but lost to her husband, her director, Brian De Palma.

C’mon, you knew Brian De Palma would appear on this list. The only question is which Hitch-influenced De Palma movie to select? His filmography is studded with them, from Sisters (1973) to Femme Fatale (2002). I opted for the one that is, in a sense, the most Hitchcockian. De Palma and screenwriter Paul Schrader concocted the story for Obsession—about a widower who meets the doppelganger of his late wife—out of their admiration for Vertigo, and the film features one of the final scores by frequent Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann. It is also the most De Palma of De Palma movies; the plot, when all its twists are revealed, is both preposterous and deeply, deeply disturbing, yet De Palma’s technical skill—aided immeasurably by a bravura performance from Geneviève Bujold—vaults past the inconsistencies and unsavory elements to conjure an overpowering atmosphere of doomed romanticism.

It’s an image that is so powerful it’s now seared into our collective memory — a skinny teenage girl in a baby pink prom dress, bathed from head to toe in blood, her eyes wide with cold fury as the school burns around her. In my estimation, few films have reached the heights of Brian De Palma’s classic tale of psychic vengeance.

I can’t exactly remember the first time I saw “Carrie,” only that I was young enough for it to be one of those films that gets under your skin and stays there. It was so beautifully and audaciously filmed, a testament to the boldness and vision of De Palma, where every moment is staged with operatic style. But just as crucially, Stephen King’s story tapped into something primal in the way that all the best horror does. Carrie’s telekinesis is a cathartic expression of the intensity of her feelings — the subconscious made manifest. For a lot of young people, and most especially for a lot of young women, we might have seen something of ourselves in this story of repressed, feverish emotion. An outsider misunderstood. The rawness and cruelty of youth.

All of this is so perfectly and brilliantly captured by Sissy Spacek. Her Carrie White is deeply strange but still incredibly sympathetic, terrifying one moment and broken the next. It’s a commanding performance that meets the heightened tone of De Palma’s film, but it is still so recognizably human. There is similarly excellent work from the entire cast, from Piper Laurie’s righteously unhinged portrayal of Carrie’s religious fanatic mother to Nancy Allen’s gleefully vicious Chris Hargenson.

“Carrie’s” status as a horror icon is undisputed. The vengeance she unleashes on her classmates in the prom sequence is masterful — as thrilling and horrifying today as it was in 1976. And yet, I think a large part of the resonance of De Palma’s film comes from the fact that it gave an enormous amount of power to a historically powerless archetype: a teenage girl. There are many ways to interpret “Carrie,” but ultimately, that for me is the source of its greatness.

Argento's filmmaking is best understood as a type of crazy poetry rather than storytelling - as John Carpenter put it, "Dario can influence and has influenced people with his absolute courage of what he can do on the screen." While Carpenter has understandably often been grouped with Argento due to their shared love for the fantastic and an unmistakable (audio-)visual approach toward their material (even as Carpenter is more into classical storytelling), a better match for Argento may be found in another American auteur who is only four days younger than the Italian master: Brian De Palma, who is also often misunderstood as a technically brilliant yet hopelessly uneven Hitchcock disciple. (When Argento choreographed a Trussardi fashion show in the '80s, crowding the catwalk with signature touches from murder to a rainstorm, he memorably used Pino Donaggio's theme from De Palma's Body Double [1984] - and soon hired Donaggio himself). In the cases of both filmmakers, the Hitchcock angle has led to overlooking many other strands that coalesce in their work. Most importantly, De Palma shares with Argento a (slightly more submerged) surrealist streak; if their overbearingly strong stylistic signatures weren't pointing in the opposite direction, one should rather think of them as heirs to Buñuel.

Sometimes my favorite movie is the one I most recently watched. Recently, I watched a movie from one of my favorite filmmakers, Claude Chabrol, and the movie is called Betty. So now that has become one of my favorite movies. It’s an incredibly beautiful film, a portrait of a very troubled soul, Betty, and a complete, intellectually honest representation of the pleasant and the unpleasant. This movie never tries to categorize victimhood, or dimensions of power. It’s more about the complexity of relationships within a given state of being. And the character played by Marie Trintignant is undeniable for me. It’s truly sublime and the way in which Chabrol directed the movie, his choices, the way he creates suspense… You know, he, with Brian De Palma, is one of the greatest Hitchcockian directors. Brian De Palma was going this direction and Chabrol went that direction, but in a way, they both are Hitchcockian people. The way in which Chabrol builds suspense out of the morality at stake is just sublime.

This zany film from Brian de Palma is not perfect but sure did stick with me.

It might be due to turning 39 years of age and my brain telling me its now or never, but 2022 really has turned out to be the year of contemplation for the old sport. This movie struck a lot of personal chords as it tells the story of a guy that leaves his silly, stuffy, nonsensical corporate job to pursue a life more serious, freeing and sensible as a tap dancing magician. Trained by the illustrious Orson Welles he sets out to achieve his dreams and escape the rat race. This is just one of several films I watched this year that I am taking as a sign to take the plunge.