Brian De Palma’s depiction of female adolescence is extremely dubious (the opening slow-mo shower scene is beyond icky), but this is a film that fundamentally fears women.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 18, 2024

It isn’t explicitly about school shootings and yet it shows you, like no other film I have ever seen, the horrifying wish-fulfilment ecstasy of such horrific acts. De Palma is the only director who could have done it.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 17, 2024

Carrie is a terrifying lyrical thriller. The director, Brian De Palma, has mastered a teasing style -- a perverse mixture of comedy and horror and tension.

| Jan 20, 2024

Brian De Palma elevates what could have been a trashy exploitation picture into something mitigated by the angry empathy it places in the put-upon outsider.

| Jul 15, 2022

It opens with an insidiously brilliant update of Psycho's shower scene and ends with a jump scare that Hitchcock would have envied; in between, it's merely the tenderest and most affecting movie ever made out of one of King's novels.

| Sep 5, 2019

Carrie's climactic empowerment is all at once the tragedy and triumph of a young woman trapped between Biblical regression and a secular coming-out.

| Dec 12, 2017

With each new movie, [De Palma] comes closer to mastering Hitchcock's trademark of teasing suspense and tongue-in-cheek horror.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 3, 2015

A voluptuously shot horror movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 6, 2013

More superpowers from Brian De Palma, this time in high school, in a screen version of a Stephen King novel that's become a horror classic.

| Jun 4, 2011

An exercise in high style that even the most unredeemably rational among moviegoers should find enormously enjoyable.

| Oct 13, 2008

Carrie is a modest but effective shock-suspense drama about a pubescent girl, her evangelical mother and cruel schoolmates.

| Oct 7, 2008

The reason Carrie is still held in such high regard as a horror classic is very simple: it's all in the sheer directorial bravado. De Palma at the top of his game.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 25, 2007

This 1976 thriller, about a high school outcast (Sissy Spacek) who uses her telekinetic powers to massacre the graduating class, contains a number of interesting ideas. But as with most of his films, De Palma can't keep track of them.

| Sep 25, 2007

Carrie might be a film about high school, but it was perhaps Brian De Palma's first completely mature film.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 25, 2006

The fierce sympathy it extends to its unfashionable central character puts the film a million miles above the contemporary line in sick exploitation.

| Feb 9, 2006

It is sometimes funny in a puzzling kind of way, it is generally overwrought in an irritating kind of way, and once in a while it is inappropriately touching.

| May 9, 2005

Young director Brian DePalma is fast making his reputation in the genre of the suspense-horror film.

| Mar 6, 2005

Brian De Palma's Carrie is an absolutely spellbinding horror movie... It's also (and this is what makes it so good) an observant human portrait.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 23, 2004

De Palma's classic creep show has dark undertones about the nastiness of teen spirit, emergent female sexuality, and rabid Christianity.

| Mar 10, 2003

Unlike other examples of the horror genre, there are classic elements of tragedy that lend this gruesome tale a compelling edge.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 17, 2001