Brian De Palma

Especially with De Palma spending nearly every minute showing off all the stuff he learned from watching so many Hitchcock films: not just the obvious touchstones (including a two-layer Vertigo homage, a protracted wordless sequence that includes a walk through in an art museum), but more abstract things about pacing, controlling what see see and how & when we see it (including an almost brazen willingness to let us know what we didn't see, thanks to some aggressively shallow focus of the killer's face), about the (American) audience's desire to be titillated by sex even though they also find it nasty and sordid and unspeakable, about the great importance in leaving the soundtrack clear enough that the important sound effects are the ones we notice first.

No, Frank Nitti did not meet death with a "Vertigo"-like Hitchcock flair.

And then, De Palma switches to ripping off "Vertigo", by having his hero following the mysterious woman.

Joachim Trier’s unexpected foray into genre territory recalls the films of M. Night Shyamalan and Brian De Palma’s Carrie, giving the tale of a girl with weird powers an icy Scandinavian mood and a slow-going pace which feels like a walk in deep snow.

Many critics have already compared Thelma to Carrie – the eponymous telekinetic ball of raging hormones from Stephen King’s first smash novel.

Brian De Palma's Carrie echoes through this Norwegian psychological thriller, which is subtler and more daring than its model.

What unravels is a film with elements of Carrie and Misery mixed with a John Hughes nightmare.

Instead, writer Scotty Landes drags the film over several days and devises a backstory that references shades of “Carrie” (1976), “Misery” (1990) and “The Sixth Sense” (1999) with a pinch of dread, but no real terror.

Four decades ago, Brian De Palma's Carrie asked us to follow a similarly wounded and humiliated young woman -- albeit one with deadly telekinetic powers -- but, by placing us directly in Carrie's horrific life, with an abusive mother and the constant jeering of her peers, it addressed the idea of audience sympathy in intriguing ways (by the end, during Carrie's eventual psychic tirade, everybody -- bad, good, or indifferent -- suffer equally).

Despite those car chases — and a particularly “Fast and Furious” one near the end – the movie combines the type of high-tech spy stuff we might see in Bond or “Mission: Impossible” with a straight-up buddy action comedy.

The sequence is somewhat reminiscent of Mission Impossible, reliant on slow-mo frames, yet retains the Fast and Furious style editing: close-ups of car parts: tires and rims, engines, and steering wheels, made more enlivening by a mounted backseat angle masquerading as a near-dashboard shot.

Two young friends, Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), play at being Tony Montana, Al Pacino's character from Scarface.

While the movie is yet another saga of killing and corruption, unlike so many of its forebears, from "Scarface" to "City of God," there appear to be no spoils.

Two charismatic but woefully foolish boys, Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) hang out in a disused building acting out scenes from Brian De Palma's "Scarface," and dreaming of creating their own two-man crime syndicate.

Speaking of the various remakes and subsequent adaptations of Carrie, the film that put him on the commercial map, he chuckles over the amusement of watching other people make mistakes that he avoided.

Although 1976’s Obsession (scripted by his fellow movie brat Paul Schrader) was a straight riff on Hitchcock, De Palma’s profile rose because of work like his Siamese-twin thriller Sisters (1973) and the one-two punch of Carrie (1976) and The Fury (1978), both of which splattered the lens with telekinetically powered blood and gore that feel of a piece with Cronenberg’s contemporaneous work.

Film director Brian De Palma rose to fame in the 1970s and 1980s with “Carrie,” “Scarface” and “The Untouchables.”

Think Mean Girls meets Carrie.

Oscar-winning "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody does her slanguage-laden best to make "Jennifer's Body" -- about a high school hottie ( Megan Fox ) turned boy-chomping demon -- into a femme-tastic anti-"Carrie," but her glib teen-hip dialogue mostly feels like self-conscious splatter over a sorely lackluster scare flick.

As for the film, it tries to be equal parts snark and snarl — think "Mean Girls" meets "Carrie."

But for pure excitement and craft, the "John Wick" films have grown into one of our most reliable action franchises -- right up there with the "Mission: Impossible" series.

All the intrigue, characters and subplots are enough to keep the series going into “Mission: Impossible” length.

Berberian Sound Studio has some of the vibe of DePalma's Blow Out (1981).

There was Brian De Palma's "Blow Out," which followed a movie sound recordist, and one could argue the case of "Singin' In The Rain," but perhaps none have gone into more depth than Peter Strickland's "Berberian Sound Studio," set almost entirely within the Italian post house of the title, and the British director's follow-up to his excellent 2009 Hungarian-language debut "Katalin Varga."

Unlike “Mission: Impossible,” another rebooted ’60s title now on screens, “U.N.C.L.E” had no catchy theme and no lasting cultural impact.

As the show no longer has much cultural currency, Ritchie doesn’t feel the need to pay due deference (no big deal in itself; neither did Tom Cruise with Mission: Impossible ), but he doesn’t establish the significance of the film’s acronymic title in a way that either justifies the ending or Hugh Grant’s casting as this secret organisation’s head.