In Blow Out, the beauty of the movie, as perhaps the beauty of life, is in its failures.

| Feb 27, 2025

Blow Out is among the top movies about moviemaking because it uses sound so cleverly and as the driving force to investigating what happened and the danger the lurks for his snooping.

| Feb 14, 2023

…Blow Out is now considered one of the all-time greats because it’s so deeply, unremittingly dark in what it observes about human nature, and what’s remarkable is how De Palma uses the film-making technique to uncover that weakness in the human soul…

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 2, 2022

Brian De Palma has always explored the ear-piercing effects of American violence on the decibel meter, never more overtly and rarely more expertly than he does here.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 11, 2022

Brian DePalma's 'earwitness' thriller may just be his best film—strong direction, a good script and self-reflexive in clever meta ways that were before its time. [Criterion 4K]

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 3, 2022

A sound effects man working on low-budget features thinks he has accidentally recorded a political assassination. He becomes obsessed with what he hears. Insisting on uncovering the truth, he seeks the help of a possible eyewitness to the supposed crime.

| Sep 21, 2022

As is often the case with De Palma, his rich sense of film history allows him to use other works as jumping-off points, not the sum total.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 11, 2022

It’s the death of the ‘60s and ‘70s that haunts Blow Out and has arguably inflated its reputation among those incapable of recognizing anything good in, say, The Fury.

| Sep 9, 2022

Blow Out may not be De Palma's best film to date but it's certainly the best thriller I've seen this year. And like all his movies it's a 'must see' if you have any real interest in the cinema.

| Jul 27, 2022

Brian DePalma keeps getting better.

| May 23, 2022

Blow Out is pure cinema, an exercise in elegant direction and refined style in which technique and plot merge into a singular body. And yet, the picture goes beyond pure cinema to question the mechanics of filmmaking.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 18, 2022

...masterwork that constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs Hitchcock's genus.

| Original Score: 96/100 | Aug 28, 2021

A captivating mystery which plays with political espionage and police corruption to create a tense and entertaining experience.

| Aug 2, 2021

A horror movie, a paranoid political drama and a serial killer flick all at once.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 21, 2021

One of the essential thrillers of the 1980s.

| Mar 1, 2021

De Palma's approach is more derivative than in the vein of an homage, and his pacing is way off the mark.

| Original Score: 3/10 | Aug 31, 2020

Respecting the genre, Brian De Palma doesn't use all of his imagination. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Aug 27, 2019

It's a Xerox of a movie that's nowhere near as indelible as the originals it purports to emulate.

| Apr 27, 2018

... the story lacks the interest of [director Brian de Palma's] latest productions. [Full review in Spanish]

| Feb 8, 2018

A wonderful thriller, densely plotted and so full of thematic resonance that it's almost incapable of supporting its own weight.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 24, 2017