BRIAN DE PALMA - MOVIE REVIEWS: THE BLACK DAHLIA

MOVIE REVIEWS: THE BLACK DAHLIA

One thing about the Black Dahlia that critics seem to agree on: it's stylish. Brian De Palma gets credit for that, along with production designer Dante Ferretti and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. But most of them also suggest that the film is stylish to a fault -- a big fault. Comments Claudia Puig in USA Today: "What it accomplishes with its stunning cinematography and set design is undercut by a lack of coherence." Writes Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe & Mail: "Film noir is a style, but self-conscious film noir is just a stylistic tic, less a genre than an ailment. And The Black Dahlia has got a really bad case _ this thing is so mannered it convulses." Philip Wuntch in the Dallas Morning News writes similarly: "The Black Dahlia is too much a director's movie. With camera angles almost operatic in grandeur, there's never any doubt that you're watching a De Palma movie." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post concludes that while the film is "visually dazzling but ultimately disappointing ... it's still possible to get a kick out of this fever dream loaded with eye candy." Most of the critics also agree that the film falls apart in the final half hour. Writes Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times: "The last-act revelations aren't just implausible -- they're connected by only the barest of threads to previous events." Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal concludes, "The baroque denouement leaves us begging for less."

15/09/2006