Hard to say if this is De Palma's best movie but this might be the most De Palma movie in his ouvre. A kaleidoscope of heists, double crosses, voyeurism, outrageous twists, and indulgent style.

DePalma mounts the film with sheer mystery, suave twist n turns and utter sexiness. His ability to present each frame with such uncertainty and creative style is really commendable. It's a masterful work in illustrious cinematography and tempting visuals. DePalma gets a point for this, He holds his Trump till the very scene and then he shows it to you by telling that it wasn't his last card. That's a top notch work in creating shocking thrill. Rebecca O'Connell is fire in and as the femme fatale, She literally controls you through her honey trap moves and tricks throughout the film. She really nails it. Theme is quite good and thoughtful, It's executed in a catchy visual style.

I don't know if it's Rebecca Romijn that just leaves the flat taste, but I couldn't connect to this attempt at a steamy thriller. It's odd, because it has a lot of the elements to make a great film noir, but most of it just feels like DePalma on autopilot.

If you like De Palma's style then watch it, of you don't then don't, though even by his standard it is very very silly

A miserable watch. The pathetic soap opera ( Dallas ( twist at the end , sums up the wretchedness of the script.

the plot is also nice but the film is boring at times

Love this movie. It's all about second chances and I am all for that.

Top thriller. Plenty of surprises throughout. Rebecca Rijn is not only beautiful but sexy. Antonio B. is hot too. She does a dance that is unforgettable. A Bolero type music begins with diamonds and kissing and everything you would want. It never lets up. The same music ends the show, and you realize what really happens.

A film noir sans the standard antihero, all lurid seduction and style, its empty flash all desire, all intrigue, looping in on itself to produce De Palma's own dizzying version of vertigo.

"That was rotten" is the least I could say.

So what if Brian De Palma's best days were behind him? That doesn't mean he was incapable of turning out some acceptably enjoyable motion pictures. Here, a daring heist performed during the Cannes Film Festival kicks off a twist and turn-filled thriller after criminal Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn) double crosses her partners to save the victim of the theft from being killed. While on the run, Laure is mistaken for a suicidal widow and uses her doppelganger's death to cover her tracks. Meeting a high-powered businessman (Peter Coyote) on a plane bound for America, all things seem to be working out for Laure. Flash forward seven years later and an ex-paparazzo (Antonio Banderas) lured into one more well paying job takes Laure's photograph, as she has become wife to the businessman-turned-ambassador and is trying to keep her past hidden. Unfortunately for her, once the photograph is made public, her ex-partners know where she is and are out for revenge. Now, Laure will have to hatch a devious plan and she might just be willing to put everyone else in danger in order to save her own skin. A box office bomb upon its initial release, it's not quite as bad as many have made it out to be over the years. This is a visually sumptuous film, buoyed by De Palma's sparse use of split screen which feels like a throwback to the cinema of old. Romijn is certainly believable as a sexy seductress of a criminal. The striptease she performs near the end of the film is the best of its decade and the hottest mainstream erotic dance since Jamie Lee Curtis turned Arnold Schwarzenegger on in "True Lies" eight years earlier. Banderas is good in his role, although one gets the feeling he could have been capable of more given a larger opportunity. Therein lies the major problem that weights "Femme Fatale" down - we're given all of the information we need to follow the film and yet it still feels somehow empty. We move from one plot point to the next, but there's no flow between the scenes. They're like snapshots taken from Banderas's camera - they're nice to look at but you suspect there's more in between the photographs that you'd like to see. I feel the same way about this film. It's a good piece, but if the characters were given more room to develop, I think the aforementioned twists and turns would have had more impact and "Femme Fatale" would have ranked higher in De Palma's body of work.

It may be completely inevitable and full of coincidences, but Femme Fatale is a brilliant, visually masterful bit of entertainment.

la mejor de brian de palma

For die-hard Brian DePalma fans only.

So much better than i remembered it. I guess I was too young to really appreciate it when I first saw it. Masterful movie.

Femme Fatale" shows why sometimes it's best to leave auteurs to their own devices. You're likely to get a debacle, but every now and then you might get a gem like this. Dreadfully beautiful women, non-linear plot unfolding, and twists abound, this erotic thriller is like "Mulholland Drive" by way of, well, by way of De Palma. It's one of the rare erotic thrillers that actually delivers the goods without ever seeming sleazy or pandering to the lowest common denominator. De Palma, always eager to self-reference on top of his standard nods to classic noir, also makes this a visual treat for film buffs looking beyond the sex and double-crosses.In the end, De Palma asks "what would you do if you had a chance to do it all over again?" Well, for starters, De Palma should've made this film ten years ago with Sharon Stone or Linda Fiorentino in the lead. Rebecca Romijn is undeniably one of the most beautiful women on earth, but she couldn't act her way out of a plastic bag. Likewise, all the other acting here is awful. The dialogue, too, is laughably bad. That, combined with an excellent music score and scenes directed to within an inch of their lives, ultimately make this a guilty pleasure to watch

Excellent suspense/mystery story. Current rating is waaaay off the mark.

The older acclaimed filmmakers get, the harder it is to retain the excitement found in their earliest films. If you're Michael Bay, no problem - you were never respected to begin with. But if you're an auteur that blew the minds of audiences and critics alike for a generation, there's a good chance you'll slip up in your later years and get lost in the sands of time. It happened to Hitchcock, to Donen, to Wilder; and, if you want to talk about present day tragedies, I could passively mention Dario Argento and Brian De Palma. But we don't have to go there. One doesn't want to slip up - but the more directors stick to their guns, the more their style seems to inevitably age. Wes Craven was meta and fresh come "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Scream" time, but these days, he's considered to be the guy that revamped the horror genre in the past, presently a living legend who just can't seem to relive his glory days. Francis Ford Coppola made the 1970s, but currently spends his time releasing little seen indies that only suggest a fall from grace. But let's go back to Brian De Palma. The Alfred Hitchcock of the 1970s and '80s, billed as the Master of the Macabre, he refreshed tired thriller predictabilities using metallically lux photography and implausible plot twists to complement the tone, not the little-there realism of it all. "Sisters", "Dressed to Kill", "Blow Out", and "Body Double" are untouchable masterpieces in sheer filmmaking, even if some of his choices are questionable - his most famous movies, "Carrie", "Scarface", and "Mission: Impossible", are famous for a reason, but hardly capture the same cockily audacious sleaziness of its sexy counterparts. But as time as gone on, De Palma's fondness of split-screens, laughable plot twists, and sunglassed blonde vixens with a like for cigarettes and sunglasses have gotten remarkably stale, most evidenced by 2012's awful "Passion". "Femme Fatale" sees him transitioning into that "old man" faze - though a lot of it doesn't work, a lot of it does, in ways as stimulating as earlier, fantastically realized moments in his filmography. There's a lot I could complain about (consider that De Palma decides to pull the rug completely out from under his plot right at the conclusion, leaving us dissatisfied and upset), but there is also a whole lot I could praise. While "Femme Fatale" is imperfect, it is often times electrifying, containing some of De Palma's most artistically brazen sequences. The titular femme fatale is Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn), a slinky thief who, in the introduction of the film, participates in a risky jewel heist at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. But things get complicated, and, unfortunately for her fellow criminals, Laure outsmarts her accomplices and ends up with the goods. After the adventure, she realizes that living the life of a piece of scum isn't for her, and so, after thinking the film is going one way, we are jerked as it cuts seven years into the future. How she gets out of trouble I cannot reveal - let's just say that some people show up in the right place at the right time. When we find her in De Palma's 2008, she is the wife of a millionaire, her past coming back to haunt her at the wrong moment. But this isn't a case of a tainted woman wanting to forget about what made her tainted in the first place; it is the continuance of a manipulator's quest for power after a long hiatus of keeping devilish instincts hidden. "Femme Fatale" gets more and more annoyingly incomprehensible as it goes along, but never does De Palma's style stop delighting us. Perhaps at the peak of his silky intuitions, he can pull off convoluted instances of slow motion cat-and-mouse games and voyeuristic split-screen snapshots because it feels so right. Tricky and exotic, "Femme Fatale" is the kind of film that flourishes the most when it's choosing style over substance - a shame that De Palma thinks that a final plot puzzle that ruins everything will actually enchant us. But there's too much good here to write off. The entire opening might be the best of his career. (The camera zooms in on a grainy version of "Double Indemnity" on a French television set, the subtitles giving it an allure hardly seen before. As the lens pulls back and reveals a shapely woman laying on a white sheeted bed, wearing nothing but lacy blank underwear, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, her hair slicked back, passively watching, we are hypnotized; the rest of the scene, mostly without dialogue and mostly recorded in single takes, transitions into the robbery itself, which, in turn, is sensationally executed.) But after these initial scenes end, "Femme Fatale" strolls along without the tension it once had and the sexiness it once put into our laps. But it has its moments, with an endlessly provocative Romijn to tie it all together. De Palma is one of the great modern filmmakers, and although the film can sometimes be slight, you can hardly deny how effortlessly his boldness translates onto the screen.

Decent De Palma flick.

Widely underrated and underappreciated Brian De Palma film. The score alone is easily in my top 10 favorite of all time. Clearly worth a watch..