You have to wonder just how vibrant the film would have been during the Reagan or Clinton administration, when De Palma was in his prime.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2007

Ghost World: Keith Uhlich on The Black Dahlia for Reverse Shot's Brian de Palma symposium.

| Nov 11, 2006

Forty-five minutes in, I was already glancing at my watch and wondering why the only lively actress in this film was playing the dead girl. Go figure.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Sep 30, 2006

Ellroy's prose crawls into characters' secret hearts and under the reader's skin, but its foetid horrors become kitschy here, the script too streamlined and the lead performances too shallow to dredge the story's depths.

| Sep 23, 2006

The pairing of Ellroy and De Palma proves a marriage made in hardboiled heaven.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 23, 2006

The picture is a kind of fattened goose that's been stuffed with goose-liver pâté. It's overrich and fundamentally unsatisfying.

Full Review | Sep 23, 2006

Almost every decision that was taken here seems to have been the wrong one, from the casting of the callow, pleasant-looking Josh Hartnett as the sexually repressed cop hero, to the mellow sepia tones overlaying night-time Los Angeles.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 23, 2006

Gorgeously realised, gripping and doused in De Palma's familiar technical wizardry.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 23, 2006

It only works in fits and starts and the grand climax is too Rocky Horror to be true, yet the heady redolence of a bygone era still proves seductive.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 23, 2006

Nails the tale's particulars but not its soul.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 20, 2006

Mr. De Palma and his collaborators have been unable to translate Mr. Ellroy's depth of feeling into cinematic equivalents.

| Sep 20, 2006

The director is more interested in seeing how many outrageously dazzling tricks he can pull off with his camera than he is in constructing a coherent or plausible storyline.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 18, 2006

There are moments when The Black Dahlia projects a spectral world, but its ghosts in broad daylight are elusive at best.

Full Review | Sep 15, 2006

The Black Dahlia feels wobbly and uncertain.

Full Review | Sep 15, 2006

Despite genius-level contributions from cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and art director Dante Ferretti, the handsome film is almost abusively murky, trafficking in difficult-to-follow plot manipulations, arbitrary twists and mumbled dialogue.

| Sep 15, 2006

In The Black Dahlia, narrative strands tangle and wither, and minor characters clutter the plot.

Full Review | Sep 15, 2006

What it accomplishes with its stunning cinematography and set design is undercut by a lack of coherence.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 15, 2006

Black Dahlia wilts from a surfeit of incident and a shortage of credibility, owing to a script by Josh Friedman that eventually turns to soap and performances that approach the hilarity of a Guy Maddin melodrama.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 15, 2006

Despite some weaknesses, The Black Dahlia remains curiously fascinating.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 15, 2006

With the exception of Aaron Eckhart, De Palma's actors can't live up to the period or the atmosphere.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 15, 2006