Is Brian de Palma really a great director?

He's highly overrated.

He essentially just rips off Hitchcock, then adds stylistic touches like slow motion.

No. I mean, come on.

"Carrie" was great - a horror classic. "Blow Out" with John Travolta and Nancy Allen was good, too - underrated.

But movies like "Body Double" and "Dressed to Kill" were overly stylized and silly.

I liked Carlito's Way

Dressed to Kill is campy fun. Scarface is a classic. I wouldn't say he's a genius or anything, but his films are entertaining.

The Untouchables is an excellent film! I love Brian DePalma’s work and hoping he has a great comeback film in him.

Raising Cain has one of the best trailers ever.

The film is an interesting homage to his past films.

His early work is highly entertaining. You never get bored watching one of his movies. Obviously, he borrowed liberally from Hitchcock and Dario Argento. I recently watched Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and noticed that he totally stole the elevator scene from Dressed to Kill from that movie.

I love Dressed to Kill up until the point Angie makes her exit. It's downhill after that and Nancy Allen gives an amateurish performance.

Most of his movies hold up to repeated viewing. They don't get better or deeper, but they stay very watchable. I particularly like The Fury (psychic powers run amok, heads explode) and Obsession, his Vertigo homage, which features an extremely gothic Bernard Herrmann score.

They're fun movies. He understood that movies are supposed to be entertaining.

He shoulda directed porn.

My introduction was Sisters.

Phantom of the Paradise is one of my favorites.

R1 his style is derived from Dario Argento

R10 Actually no heads explode in The Fury. John Cassavetes explodes but his head remains intact.

I finally watched The Fury recently and it was so, so unexpectedly bad.

R17 did you notice that the other students at The Paragon institute are only seen once when Gillian and her mother are being shown around and after that Gillian seems to be the only student there. Her mother disappears as well; we never see her again.

What R10 said. He's a master of highly stylized camp. "Body Double" is such a ridiculous movie and you realize it half way through, but you still continue watching it and admire the commitment that's been made by everyone involved. The same goes for "Dressed To Kill". Honestly, I'd rather watch either than a number of Hitchcock classics. I'd love to see what he would've done with, say, "Gone Girl", since the trashy and ridiculous source material was begging for de Palma treatment.

I'm an unashamed de Palma fan. CARRIE, DRESSED TO KILL, BLOW OUT, THE UNTOUCHABLES and CASUALTIES OF WAR are wonderful movies that I love without reservation, and I find a lot to enjoy in SISTERS, OBSESSION, THE FURY, RAISING CAIN, CARLITO'S WAY and FEMME FATALE. Even misfires like SNAKE EYES and MISSION TO MARS and PASSION have great sequences that only he could or would have done that way.

Hitchcock's influence is obvious in so much of his work, but I think writing him off as just a Hitchcock wannabe is lazy; he's actually taking Hitchcock's vocabulary and exploring it with his own distinct sensibility.

I thought the best director for The Fury would probably be mid-eighties Cronenberg, but then I realized he had already basically covered this with Scanners

He makes giallo movies...great set pieces, visually stunning but completely incoherent.

I love most of his films, probably because he aped a lot from Hitchcock and Argento, my two favorite movie directors, as someone pointed out above. It doesn’t take away from the fact that a lot of his movies are highly stylized, incredibly entertaining, and impulsively rewatchable. His dark sense of humor is also an asset.

Totally agree with R11. I think that the best example from that statement is "Femme Fatale" (2002)

I dare to think that the main reason it wasn't so liked by critics is because they were trying to take the film too seriously.

Personally, I love everything about it, specially the robbery at Cannes Film Festival sequence, its soundtrack by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto and the extended plot twist.

Femme Fatale would’ve been appreciated more if it had a better lead actress (Charlize Theron would’ve been amazing or even Sharon Stone).

Rebecca Romijn is gorgeous to look at but she was too lightweight of an actress to carry a film.