Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma is that rare cinematic unicorn—a documentary about a legendary filmmaker that doesn’t try to lionize him so much as let him talk. And boy, does he talk. For 110 minutes, Brian De Palma sits in a chair and unloads decades of stories, triumphs, grievances, and glorious cinematic vengeance like a mob boss with final cut. There’s no narrator. No talking heads. Just De Palma’s face, that gravelly voice, and a greatest-hits reel of slow-motion murder, erotic voyeurism, and a trail of bodies stretching from Carrie to Carlito’s Way.
It’s essentially De Palma Unplugged—an old war criminal revisiting his greatest crimes with pride, wit, and a tinge of bitterness. And it’s magnificent.
Baumbach and Paltrow, both clear fanboys, have the good sense to stay out of the way. They know the man is the show. De Palma doesn’t need stylized reenactments or artsy voiceovers. He’s got the receipts and the scars. The documentary cuts between his commentary and clips from his films—juxtaposing his blunt, surgical dissection of each project with footage of lithe women being stalked in elevators and gangsters getting shot in the face during opera.
It starts with Greetings and Hi, Mom!, where De Palma used a young, unhinged Robert De Niro like a rabid ferret with a Super 8 camera. Then it rolls through the ’70s and ’80s, the golden age of De Palmaian chaos: Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Scarface, Body Double. You begin to realize this man wasn’t just making movies—he was setting fire to the Catholic school of American cinema and dancing around the flames with a steadicam.
The best part? De Palma knows exactly what he did. He doesn’t pretend his films were misunderstood masterpieces. He doesn’t call Snake Eyes a diamond in the rough. He calls a bomb a bomb and a studio exec a moron. His candor is refreshing in an industry built on sycophancy and PR-scrubbed legacy polishing. This isn’t Spielberg on Spielberg. This is the guy who got kicked out of the club for filming a woman in a glass shower being stabbed with a broken mirror and still thought, “Yeah, that was pretty good.”
De Palma owns his influences too—chief among them, Hitchcock. To some, his entire career is an elaborate tribute act to Hitch, like if Vertigo and Rear Window had an affair in a strip club bathroom. De Palma doesn’t deny it. He embraces it with the weary sigh of a man who’s heard the accusation so many times, it might as well be tattooed on his director’s chair. He says he studied Hitchcock because no one else was making thrillers that knew how to move a camera. And then he added cocaine, leggy blondes, and synth scores because subtlety is for cowards.
And then there’s Scarface, a film that De Palma describes like a chaotic bender. It’s clear he enjoyed the bloodbath. He talks about Pacino like a mad scientist describing his favorite monster. You can feel him grinning when recounting the chainsaw scene or the MPAA’s pearl-clutching fits. It’s in these moments that De Palma becomes more than just a retrospective—it becomes a confessional. A celebration of a man who made beautiful, operatic trash with a brain and a switchblade.
But the documentary isn’t all glory. There’s The Bonfire of the Vanities—a catastrophe that gets covered like the cinematic Hindenburg it was. De Palma doesn’t sugarcoat it. He basically admits it was a mistake to take on the project. There’s something cathartic about watching a filmmaker with zero interest in redemption arc mythology. He’s not looking for sympathy. He just wants to explain why the ship sank and who was drunk at the wheel.
The beauty of De Palma is in its simplicity. It doesn’t try to decode the man. It doesn’t pretend to be objective. It just lets him talk. And in doing so, it paints a portrait of an artist who was always a little out of step with his peers—more cynical than Spielberg, more stylish than Scorsese, and way more likely to shoot someone through a plate glass window while a choir sings.
He talks about casting, about budget battles, about how Sean Penn was a pain in the ass. He talks about body doubles, long takes, and why he thinks most American directors don’t understand visual storytelling. He sounds like a war vet explaining how to properly booby-trap a dolly shot. He’s funny, he’s cranky, and he’s almost always right.
What’s most surprising is how, beneath the bravado and blood, you see the soul of a real artist—someone who believed movies should have guts (often literally), rhythm, and scope. Someone who took risks. Not always good ones, but bigones. The industry moved on. Tastes changed. But De Palma? He kept swinging.
The documentary ends not with a victory lap but a sigh. De Palma in his later years, still in love with the form, but worn out by the game. There’s a sense of melancholy there—one last overhead shot before the credits roll. It’s strangely touching, watching this architect of carnage and chaos mellow into an old man with war stories and a collection of burned bridges.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 voyeuristic crane shots.
Watch it if you’ve ever admired a hallway tracking shot, questioned the existence of Mission to Mars, or wanted to know how many times you can stab someone in a shower before the MPAA sends a cease-and-desist. De Palma is a love letter to a cinematic outlaw—funny, ferocious, and just deranged enough to remind you why film used to feel dangerous.