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Brian De Palma has become the directorial litmus test of cinephiles everywhere. To supporters, he stands as a startling visual genius with a penchant for set pieces and lurid subject matter. To naysayers, he remains a lowbrow imitator who spends his studio budgets chasing the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard. Great director or high class hack? Inconsistent misogynist or Master of the Macabre? Much like his fractured narratives, the answer is never an easy one to attain.

Both sides provide ample support for their case. De Palma’s resume is riddled with enough hollow imitations (Sisters [1973], Raising Cain [1992]) and bloated commercial flops (The Bonfire of the Vanities [1990], The Black Dahlia [2006]) to sink any director. But even in misfires such as these, an undeniable attention to detail remains.

The split screen cover-up of Sisters or the heartbreaking screen tests of The Black Dahlia are breathtaking in scope and execution,...

A pyrotechnics stunt gone fatally wrong last year during production on a Discovery Channel pilot has resulted in a wrongful death suit filed this week. “As a direct result of Discovery’s negligence and negligence in using, or authorizing the use of, pyrotechnic devices during the production of the “Brothers in Arms” pilot, Terry Flannel was killed,” says a complaint (read it here) filed yesterday in Colorado federal court by Flannel’s family against Discovery Communications. The six-claim complaint seeks a jury trial and unspecified damages in excess of $75,000 for the incident on June 14, 2012 during the filming of what was to be the opening sequence of the Wwi-themed show. “Anthropic’s negligence and negligence per sein using pyrotechnic devices during the production of the “Brothers in Arms” pilot created an unreasonable risk of physical harm to Plaintiff Mel Bernstein, who was directly in the line of fire of the airborne pyrotechnic devices,...