In the article, White quotes De Palma from the Passion days of 2013:

At the beginning of Amazon Prime’s new erotic thriller The Voyeurs, a pair of mildly repressed twentysomethings watch their neighbours romp away on their kitchen island across the street. “They want us to look!” cries the guy, as his girlfriend feigns discomfort. In truth, she’s guiltily aroused, desperately wanting to perv but unsure if she should. The couple are characters in a sweaty, stylised, and overwhelmingly ludicrous movie. They are also everyone who has ever watched an erotic thriller. That most polarising of film genres lay dormant for years, its saxophone scores unheard, those phallic murder weapons collecting dust. Now it’s back, in all its maddening, barenaked glory. Hopefully, anyway.

We’ve been here before. With the launch of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015, there were rumbles that a cottage industry of adults-only dramas would be unfurled upon the world, resurrecting a style of filmmaking unseen since Michael Douglas stopped taking his clothes off in movies. Instead, the trilogy of book adaptations petered out, and mainstream American cinema maintained its oddly sexless status quo. Eroticism, love-making, even romantic intimacy are big-screen anomalies in 2021. And while we’ve generally convinced ourselves that we’re far more progressive and sexually open than we used to be, at least in the public sphere, cinema is nowhere near as straight-up sexy as it was 25 years ago.

The cinema of the late Eighties and early Nineties was dominated by powerful stars who oozed sex and chaos. There were genre titans Douglas and Sharon Stone, who tangled with one another in 1992’s Basic Instinct, then separately sowed sexual carnage in less-remembered thrillers in the aftermath, such as Disclosure (1994) and Sliver (1993). Linda Fiorentino, Richard Gere, Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger – the last two of whom slathered each other in jelly and assorted meats in Nine ½ Weeks (1986) – were perennial erotica stars, and you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a Demi Moore topless scene. The erotic thriller – from the highs of Fatal Attraction (1988) and Crash (1996) to the barrel-scraping (yet fun!) lows of Body of Evidence (1993) and Jade (1995) – turned mortal actors into prurient myth, or figures burned into the eternal fantasies of millions.

In their heyday, erotic thrillers cut together sex and murder with socio-political symbolism. They were secretly about inadequate males terrified by third-wave feminism in the office and in the bedroom. They were about fear of kink, of bisexuality, of unbridled lust. They were about Aids. It’s no coincidence that tales of sexual carnivores rampaging through America trailed a disease so often reduced to one clear message: have sex and die.

For the most part, erotic thrillers echoed that kind of wrong-headed moralising. Female agency was a catch-22, they insisted. Give women an ounce of power, and they’re inclined to take your job, wreck your home and try to kill you. The best of the genre, though, understood the pleasure of watching a female character intentionally destroy everything she touches. Basic Instinct, The Last Seduction (1994) and even the maligned Showgirls (1995) are all anchored by sociopathic women dismantling worlds set up to hurt them. They revel in glamour and violence, reduce libidinous men to weak-minded boys, and get away with murder. The films they’re in are absolutely dubious in nature – no genre that melted together noir, horror and pornography could ever not be – but they allowed for a feminine, sexual and moral complexity almost entirely absent from American filmmaking in the decades since.

There are any number of reasons why the mainstream erotic thriller went limp towards the end of the Nineties. The easy availability of internet porn meant randy adults didn’t need to pay £15 to see simulated sex with tasteful lighting. And when the president is receiving oral sex from an intern and scandalising every household in America, James Spader – of Crash, Dream Lover and Sex, Lies and Videotape – being horny and devious seemed suddenly quaint.

“It’s kind of a lost art,” Brian De Palma – director of Body Double (1984) and Dressed to Kill (1987) – told The Guardian in 2013. “I don’t think anybody’s interested in it any more … They say [my films] are ‘erotic European trash’. I’m like, ‘What are they talking about? These women look fantastic. I spent a lot of time making them look as stylish as possible!’”

We also seemed to lose our vocabulary when it came to big-screen sex appeal. If today’s stars are often accused of being oddly chaste on-screen, it’s only because we prefer them that way. Somewhere along the line, to acknowledge a movie star’s beauty became slightly dubious, or diminishing of their talent. Many factors are to blame: lascivious profiles of female movie stars seemingly written by 12-year-old boys; women on the red carpet demanding to be “asked more” than who they’re wearing, as if fashion, image and aesthetics are inherently vacuous; a Hollywood climate justly striving to be far less exploitative and dysfunctional than it was pre-#MeToo, but ultimately flattening or altogether erasing sex as a whole. Take the recent Jungle Cruise, an adventure romp modelled almost entirely after 1999’s The Mummy. But while Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz oozed carnality and sexual chemistry together, Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt bore all the erotic frisson of distant cousins.

Stow's co-host, Joey Bauer, mistakenly tells special guest Craig Leman that De Palma has never written any of the screenplays to his movies, so you can see right away that while their discussion of De Palma's films seems thoughtful and intelligent, it is not exactly fully-informed, nor well-researched. Here's the episode description:

Brian De Palma has been called a genius and a hack, but you can't deny that he makes a memorable film. This week, joined by special guest Craig Leman, we dig into De Palma's filmography to talk about his sleazy atmospheres, signature visual style, and confounding depiction of women.

Spoiled in this episode: Blow Out, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Redacted.

One of the most interesting aspects of the episode is Skipper Martin's discussion of how he used to dismiss De Palma's nods to Hitchcock as nothing but a "ripoff,"  but how a re-watch of Dressed To Kill made it all click for him-- that De Palma was "playing" with the viewer, using what the viewer knows about Hitchcock to set the viewer up. And it made him rethink what Tarantino does, then, as well. Skipper possibly gets that idea from Roger Ebert, who says something similar in the Siskel/Ebert Untouchables-era discussion about Sisters they include in the episode.

From improvisatory comedy to classic horror films and thrillers, Brian De Palma has established himself as one of the screen’s foremost stylists, and one of his films in particular is the subject of TCM’s podcast The Plot Thickens: Season 2 - The Devil’s Candy. Drawing on influences as disparate as Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock, he’s created a body of work — 32 narrative features to date along with shorts, documentaries and music videos — among the most distinctive in modern cinema.

Along the way, he brought Robert De Niro to the screen for the first credited time (in 1968’s Greetings), introduced Martin Scorsese to De Niro and screenwriter Paul Schrader and helped George Lucas write the opening scrawl for the first Star Wars film. Along with De Niro, De Palma also fostered the careers of John Lithgow (in Obsession, 1976); Sissy Spacek, John Travolta, Amy Irving and Nancy Allen (in Carrie, 1976); and Melanie Griffith (in Body Double, 1984). He has been honored with awards from the Berlin and Venice Film Festivals and Amnesty International (for his 2007 political thriller Redacted) while also receiving a record six nominations for the Razzie Award for Worst Director. [Editor's note: blah-di-blah-di-blah.]

The Newark, NJ, native was studying physics at Columbia University when he fell in love with film after seeing Citizen Kane (1941) and Vertigo (1958). While earning an MA in theater from Sarah Lawrence College, De Palma shot his first film in 1963, The Wedding Party (1969), co-directed with Sarah Lawrence professor Wilford Leach and fellow student Cynthia Munroe and starring De Palma’s friend De Niro along with Jill Clayburgh and De Palma regular William Finley. Because of a dispute with financial backer Stanley Borden, the film was held from release until after De Palma’s comedy, Greetings brought attention to De Palma and De Niro.

De Palma moved from comedy to suspense for the first time with Sisters (1972), starring Finley, Jennifer Salt and Margot Kidder. This was also the first of two De Palma films (along with Obsession) scored by Bernard Herrmann, one Hitchcock’s key collaborators. De Palma’s first major hit was the Stephen King adaptation Carrie, which brought Spacek and Piper Laurie Oscar nominations. He scored another major hit with his remake of Scarface (1983), starring Al Pacino, followed by the equally successful The Untouchables (1987), which brought Sean Connery an Oscar. He also helped launch Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible film franchise in 1996, though he declined an offer to direct the 2000 sequel.

De Palma’s films are distinguished by a variety of techniques, including the use of split-screen, long pans, tracking shots and unusual angles. He is also noted for quoting generously from other directors, most notably Hitchcock, whose Vertigo inspired both Obsession and Body Double. Others he has cited as inspiration include Michelangelo Antonioni, whose Blowup (1966) is reflected in De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), and Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin (1925) is referenced in the staircase shoot out of The Untouchables.

TCM presents five of De Palma’s films, including three network premieres:

Sometimes, recommending a "classic filmmaker" feels a little like recommending vegetables. In an age when free time is sparse and real life is full of inherent struggle, why use the precious moments we have to watch movies that require mental taxation, sitting through slogs, or reckoning with works wholly unconcerned with basic entertainment?

I promise you: You will not have this problem watching Brian De Palma, one of our most singular filmmakers concerned with the ideas of cinematic "pleasure." His prolific body of work, from 1968 until today, is full of pure entertainment, of provocative subject matter, of genres stuffy cineastes often denigrate as being lesser-than. De Palma is an all-caps DIRECTOR, an artist who blows out his frames with delicious techniques, a visual stylist of the most propulsive order.

We've curated a list of De Palma's 12 most essential films, an intriguing list of entertainment that will shock you, titillate you, and simply demand your attention. From his sleazy horror-thriller odysseys to his mainstream thrill rides to his surprisingly political experimentations, these Brian De Palma films will never bore you, will always surprise you, and will leave you wanting more. Enjoy watching...

Beginning with Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, and moving on chronologically through Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, the fourth film in Swanson's dozen is De Palma's Blow Out:

We’d venture a guess that, for a lot of folks, there’s a good chance that Mission: Impossible is their first foray into Brian De Palma’s filmography. And if all those obsession-fuelled close-ups and paranoiac split diopter shots turned your crank, we’d recommend diving into the deep end with Blow Out, arguably the crown jewel of De Palma’s career and the thriller genre, period. Jack Terry (John Travolta) is a skilled sound recording artist who works on B-grade horror films. One night, while recording some new audio, he captures something unexpected with his sound recording equipment: a gunshot, a blowout, and a car crashing into a creek. Driven by curiosity and a fervent sense that the public ought to know the truth, Jack rages against the ensuing cover-up, risking not only his life but that of the young sex worker (Nancy Allen) he pulled from the watery wreck that fateful night.

David Fear, Rolling Stone

If you’re among the legion of readers who breathlessly turned the pages of Finn’s novel, you know what’s on deck. If you haven’t, you might wonder whether you’re about to venture in a gaslighting parable, a Vertigo-style setup, another tale of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown or something far more sinister. To get into any plot details past this point is to play hopscotch in a minefield. What can be said is that Anthony Mackie and Brian Tyree Henry also show up, and like Oldman and Leigh, they too feel underused here; the film’s tweaked view of motherhood is a rich vein that’s never quite tapped; and you will need to endure an Overlook Hotel-level maze of plot twists and the kind of major suspension of disbelief that can leave permanent palm marks on your face.

You may also want to preemptively take some Dramamine, given director Joe Wright’s penchant for throwing in skewed, Dutch-angled shots to break up the monotony every few minutes. The filmmaker has always had a gift for cracking open literary texts and getting intriguing films out of them, finding a one-size-fits-all method of turning words on a page into sound and vision; even his experimental take on Anna Karenina manages to get enough Tolstoy on the screen that you recognize the book underneath the meta-theatrical flourishes. He’s also not afraid to swing for the fences when it comes to stylizing his storytelling — this is the filmmaker who, with Atonement‘s unbroken five-minute Steadicam shot of Dunkirk’s devastation, proved that there’s a gossamer-thin line between virtuosity and indulgence.

With Window, he throws in a few grand gestures: a hallucinogenic splash of red across the frame here, a snowy car wreck transposed into a living room setting there, a couple of ingenious modern variations on the ol’ split-screen composition. Mostly, however, the playbook consists of “ape Hitchcock,” followed by blank pages. (Though kudos to cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel’s ability to inject menace into every dark corner and Danny Elfman’s Herrmann-for-all-seasons score.) When in doubt, throw in an old movie homage or, better yet, an actual clip of an old movie — Rear Window, sure, but also Laura, Spellbound, the Bogart-Bacall joint Dark Passage. These are all vintage thrillers that deal with idealized females and women in peril, mutable and mistaken identities, psychological deterioration, and the effects of trauma, which pertains directly to what The Woman in the Window is digging into with its tale of unraveling. Its inability to jolt life into this crazed, harebrained narrative, or to even sustain tension for longer than a few scenes, feels like it undermines any sort of goal of being considered in that company. You go in with high expectations about what this collection of talent can do with this batshit pulp fiction. You leave feeling like you owe Brian De Palma a thousand apologies.

In The Woman in the Window, Amy Adams plays a shut-in who is also a film buff. Every night, she swirls dark red wine in a thin-stemmed glass and falls asleep beneath glowing big-screen projections of classic thrillers from the 1940s and ’50s, babbling along to dialogue she knows by heart. Early on in the film, the camera tracks around a corner and catches a glimpse of Jimmy Stewart dangling precipitously from a ledge in Rear Window, simultaneously signaling the movie’s aspirations to greatness and underlining how short it falls. When Brian De Palma paid intelligent, self-conscious homage to Alfred Hitchcock in movies like Dressed to Kill and Body Double, he was derided by critics as a rip-off artist. Who knows what those same critics would say about Joe Wright’s work here, which suggests a destitute man’s De Palma, or maybe what it would look like if De Palma had really been slumming it all those years: a potentially juicy movie sucked dry of satirical sophistication or subversive purpose.

This is not to say that Wright is untalented. Take 2011’s semi-beguiling action-sci-fi hybrid Hanna, for example. The filmmaker took a standard-issue child-assassin story line—a teenage Bourne Identity—and coded it as a millennial fairy tale, complete with Cate Blanchett as a wicked-stepmother type emerging during the film’s amusement-park climax from the mouth of a gigantic, fiberglass wolf. (It is quite an image.) Wright’s refusal to just phone things in is admirable, and what makes The Woman in the Window watchable—at least for a while—is the tension between the rote-ness of the material and the striving aestheticism of Wright’s visual sensibility: all florid, Eyes Wide Shut–style backlighting, restless, prowling cinematography, and angles that play up the gorgeous, unsettling architecture of Adams’s character’s towering New York brownstone, with its intricate network of spiral staircases and vertiginously deep drop into a forbidding cement basement.

The visual gamesmanship of The Woman in the Window is relentless, and at times the baroque theatricality of the presentation works the way it’s supposed to, conveying the confusion of a woman caught between a drab, depressive reality and a hallucinatory fantasy life, unsure which is worse. But as hard as Wright works, he can’t come up with anything as strange or destabilizing as the behind-the-scenes narrative that led to his film being delayed, reshot, and shunted off to a streaming premiere via Netflix—a trajectory that was not the original plan.

The Woman in the Window is based on a best-selling, pseudonymous novel by the notorious fabulist Daniel Mallory, whose history of lies, delusions, and borderline plagiaristic writing practices was outlined in a phenomenal 2019 New Yorker profile by Ian Parker—an investigative piece that reads like a thriller. In it, Parker juxtaposed Mallory’s use of an unreliable narrator in his debut against the author’s debunked, real-life claims of his parents’ tragic deaths (research revealed that they were alive and well) and undergoing surgery for a cancerous brain tumor (which he did not have). “Dissembling seemed the easier path,” Mallory wrote in response to the article that went so far as to compare him to Patricia Highsmith’s duplicitous psychopath Tom Ripley—a character Mallory had falsely claimed to have written a dissertation on at Oxford.

Suffice it to say that a movie about a promising young novelist lying his way to the top of the publishing industry is potentially richer than yet another variation on the archetype of the middle-aged woman whose mind is playing tricks on her. Currently, Jake Gyllenhaal is slated to play Mallory in an upcoming Netflix series that promises to split the difference between Nightcrawler and Shattered Glass. (Sounds good, actually.) In the meantime, though, The Woman in the Window arrives as damaged goods, its ending reportedly rewritten by Tony Gilroy after a series of disastrous test screenings.

The scenario of a high-profile genre movie left for dead in the wake of an inter-studio merger and the onset of COVID-19 recalls the story behind The Empty Man, but there isn’t likely to be a cult around The Woman in the Window. The question instead is whether its glossy pile-up of big stars, ridiculous twists, and hand-me-down Hitchcock-isms are enough to qualify it as enjoyably kitschy middlebrow-slasher trash, or if it just falls short of so-bad-it’s-good status—if it’s just bad enough to be bad.

At this point, it’s worth asking whether Amy Adams knows the difference, or cares. The Woman in the Window completes an unofficial trilogy with Hillbilly Elegy and the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects in which the actress—whose past brilliance is undeniable—has striven almost fetishistically to give her characters rough, jagged edges. They’re the kinds of “transformational” roles that attract awards attention—or that’s the idea, anyway. (The Oscars didn’t bite on her hillbilly act.)

Here, her Anna Fox is a child psychologist on professional leave while she sorts through some undefined trauma of her own. Wright opens purposefully on a shot of his star’s puffy, bloodshot eye (shades of Janet Leigh’s posthumous close-up in Psycho, for those playing Wright’s game and keeping score). From her eyes on down, Anna is a wreck, and Adams’s performance lands somewhere between the condescending Appalachian karaoke of Hillbilly Elegy and the kamikaze charisma of her role in Sharp Objects, where she was guided by director Jean-Marc Vallee toward a surprisingly credible portrait of self-destruction. The gimmick of her character pathologically carving words into her own flesh only partially accounted for the ways the actress managed to get under our skin.

Back when Mallory was giving interviews about something other than being a serial liar, he claimed that Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl inspired him to write his own book, but The Woman in the Window doesn’t move like one of Flynn’s thrillers. It’s locked in place, like a one-act play—an exercise in nervous tension and claustrophobia. And it isn’t funny, either, another deficiency that distances it from De Palma as well as Hitchcock, with their twin signature grins. It does, however, boast that irresistibly (and derivatively) Hitchcockian hook of a crime witnessed surreptitiously at a distance by a nosy protagonist—the voyeur imperiled by her own peeping.

Tracy Letts is a vibrant playwright, but the dialogue in “The Woman in the Window” is weirdly stilted, like someone’s chintzy mainstream-movie attempt at Pinter or Mamet. Adams’ performance is by turns commanding and tremulously self-conscious. And stuff keeps happening that’s so overwrought that the film, in its way, becomes a whirlpool of contrivance. Each time Anna tries to explain her actions, either to her husband or to a sympathetic not-quite-by-the-book police detective (Brian Tyree Henry), she seems paranoid and delusional. But, of course, if everything we were seeing was all just happening in her head, that could be its own kind of cheat. So the contrivances may have to be real after all! “The Woman in the Window” would like to be a contempo “Rear Window,” but it’s so riddled with things you can’t buy that it plays like a bad Brian De Palma movie minus the camera movement.

But by hewing close to Anna’s own intense unease, “Woman in the Window” attempts something like the recent Oscar-winning “The Father,” which adapted its protagonist’s dementia. This is the kind of stuff that Brian De Palma would eat for breakfast. He, surely, would find more disturbing and lurid avenues to explore here.