"Mind you, De Palma is masterfully edited, cutting between the chatty director and a flurry of incredible clips from the films themselves (there goes the budget!) and behind the scenes stuff from De Palma’s vaults (love the 8MM footage of Steven Spielberg, De Palma’s former best friend and the director’s ex-wife, actress Nancy Allen, sending love out to their colleague; a beautiful snapshot of a time and place that exists only in myth). So, who knows how hard Baumbach and Paltrow worked to get their mentor into his comfort zone. Either way, they did and it’s amazing.

"DE PALMA will be an orgasmic experience for the faithful. But it is also required viewing for every aspiring director who dreams of making commercially successful product, while still maintaining the pure vision of an artist. Truly, it’s difficult to think of another Hollywood filmmaker who has so deftly managed to make such personal work on such a grand scale."

Jesse Hawken of Torontoist posted a review of the documentary last week, in anticipation of the Hot Docs Film Festival:

This film is a chronological tour of De Palma’s complete filmography, guided by the director himself with a bounty of clips and juicy stories about a career full of fights with actors (he had a tough time working with Cliff Robertson on his first big budget film Obsession), studios (Columbia Pictures wouldn’t let him cast the porn star Annette Haven in his erotic thriller Body Double), and the ratings board (which came to a head when he got an X rating for Scarface after submitting three versions, finally putting all the violence back in). De Palma is candid when discussing the highs and lows of his 50-year directing career: he passed on directing Flashdance and Fatal Attraction; he says he lost his nerve adapting Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of The Vanities; and feels he never made a better film than Carlito’s Way.

The final section of the film is unexpectedly moving as it heads into the director’s decline, which began after his greatest box office success Mission: Impossible, as he got lost in making the visual-effects-heavy Mission To Mars; its spectacular failure at the box office was the end of De Palma’s American career, as he looked to Europe for financing and the years between features lengthened. As illustrated by the clips from his recent, less-consequential works like Passion and The Black Dahlia, De Palma understands, like his hero Hitchcock in the years after Psycho, that his glory days are behind him, that the industry has changed around him, that it gets harder as one gets older.

Directors Baumbach and Paltrow are obviously huge admirers of De Palma’s work, and the film succeeds as a solid testament to his career and importance. This film is a feast for De Palma lovers who may not be so familiar with the smaller, harder-to-see films from earlier in his career, like Greetings, Get To Know Your Rabbit, and Home Movies; conversely, this clip-heavy documentary might not be the best place to start for newcomers to De Palma’s work, as the twists and climaxes to some of his greatest films will be ruined for you, especially the magnificent downer ending of Blow Out.

Meanwhile, Arnaud Desplechin's My Golden Days opens this Friday. You may recall that De Palma, Baumbach, Paltrow, and Wes Anderson all attended that film's premiere last fall at the New York Film Festival (NYFF director Kent Jones also appears in the group photo above with Desplechin). Sounds like Desplechin got a chance to catch De Palma, as well-- Here's the beginning part of Metro's Matt Prigge article, posted today:

Arnaud Desplechin loves talking film so much he doesn’t only talk about his own films. The French director (of "Kings and Queen" and "A Christmas Tale") is in New York to promote “My Golden Days,” a prequel-of-sorts to his 1996 film “My Sex Life…or How I Got into an Argument,” visiting two of its characters, Paul and Esther (Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos, though only Amalric appears), when they were young and first in love (and now played by Quentin Dolmaire and Lou Roy-Lecollinet).

But he just saw “De Palma,” Noah Baumbach and Jake [Paltrow]’s doc about filmmaker Brian De Palma, and he gushes about the minimalist way it’s been shot and constructed. Soon we’re talking about Woody Allen, and it’s a miracle we quickly steered things back to his own (excellent) new film.

De Palma is someone who’s sometimes written off as trashy, but he has a strong critical fanbase. Are there other filmmakers you think are underrated?
Woody Allen. For years, decades he was underestimated. Film buffs are often half-and-half with him. But what he achieved with 12 films in 12 years between the ’80s and ’90s was just amazing — films like “Another Woman,” “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Zelig.” Some American critics are reluctant to like him — they think he’s too New York, too Caucasian, too whatever. Now we can see people really taking him seriously. Ten years ago I felt lonely when I was discussing Woody Allen with American critics.

Even some of his films from the last 20 years are very interesting.
I love “Deconstructing Harry.” “Magic in the Moonlight” is a good film. “Blue Jasmine” — I know American critics loved it because of the performances, which are stunning. But I saw it again on TV a few weeks and [shrugs]. “Magic in the Moonlight” was better.

Even Woody Allen is hard on Woody Allen. He openly disparages his own work.
There is a trend that I love in cinema, where people who are passionate about it say the same thing, which is silly, which is: It was so much better before. The cinema was silent, and soon as sound and dialogue came in, people said cinema was dead. Then came [Ingmar] Bergman, and Bergman said, “What I do is nothing compared to [Victor] Sjostrom or [Carl Theodor] Dreyer.” Then you come to Woody Allen and he says, “What I’m doing is nothing compared to Bergman.” It’s always about complaining that things are the same — but actually, cinema is always different. I love that people always complain that cinema is always done, and then it finds a way to reinvent itself with each generation.

Jones replies, "For a very specific reason, because Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow just did a movie about him. They worked on that film for about four years. I asked [De Palma] and he said he wanted to save what he thought about Hitchcock for their movie. We just showed the documentary [De Palma] at the New York Film Festival. Noah and I are pretty good friends, and we kind of exchanged movies at a certain point and we both were amazed at how much they just talked to each other. That’s what their movie is, just Brian and nobody else. He’s talking about his craft, and he’s talking a lot about Vertigo. In fact, the movie begins with a clip from Vertigo. That seemed like a very compelling reason for [De Palma] to not be in [this] film."

Also at RogerEbert.com, Odie Henderson reviews Hitchcock/Truffaut. Henderson concludes in his review, "One interview subject you might be expecting is missing from Hitchcock/Truffaut. Brian De Palma declined to appear in the film, but he had a good reason. He was busy sitting with Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow for their one-man interview/documentary, De Palma. That film, which is also quite good, would make a great double feature with Hitchcock/Truffaut. Both films feature a director talking to another director about his body of work. The similarities are complementary, and I can think of no better way to waste an afternoon if you love movies."