The heist of some rare diamonds during the Cannes Film Festival goes horribly wrong, and not necessarily by accident.

 There are three kinds of Brian De Palma movies: first there’s…well, Brian De Palma Movies, peculiar, idiosyncratic films in which the director is the star, movies that swim in style and pastiche and an almost overwhelming love of cinema for its own sake; then there are Brian-Needs-the-Money Movies, big budget, all-star Hollywood productions that have little to do with De Palma’s usual concerns, and that have often resulted in jaw-dropping, spectacular misfires like The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and pure, wrong-headed show biz flubs like Mission to Mars (2000); and finally, there’s The Untouchables (1987), which was a Brian-Needs-the-Money movie that, somehow, went spectacularly right.

His latest film, Femme Fatale, falls solidly in the first category, an unabashed Brian De Palma Movie that overflows with so much visual style and lyricism it approaches symphonic dissolution, an outrageous practical joke wrapped inside a conundrum cloaked in the mercurial genre of film noir. (more…)