De Palma has finally made a movie in which his bravura filmmaking aesthetic complements an intriguing story rather than smokescreens a mediocre one.
Comment
09/14/06
The Black Dahlia (2006)
34
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:179
Fresh:61
Rotten:118
Average Rating:4.9/10
Consensus: Though this ambitious noir crime-drama captures the atmosphere of its era, it suffers from subpar performances, a convoluted story, and the inevitable comparisons to other, more successful films of its genre.
Runtime: 2 hrs 2 mins
Genre: Dramas
US Box Office: $22,518,325
Synopsis: Based on the novel by James Ellroy, Brian De Palma's THE BLACK DAHLIA stars Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart as a pair of LAPD detectives assigned to the most notorious murder in Hollywood history.... [More]
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart
Director: Brian De Palma
Reviews for The Black Dahlia
161 - 180 (sorted by date; Australian critics are listed first)
In reaching for tragic grandeur and psychological complexity, the movie takes on a lot of baggage that it can't quite carry.
09/14/06
The Black Dahlia is an essay in incoherence. The confusion wouldn’t matter if there were any feeling onscreen, but the blood and innards seem missing from the movie, too.
09/14/06
Brian De Palma's film honors Ellroy's grim prose but can't accommodate his byzantine plot. What seems rich and intricate on the page is tangled and impenetrable onscreen.
09/14/06
Swank’s character and her performance are good enough to merit a movie of their own, instead of serving as fourth wheel to this lifeless ménage à trois.
09/14/06
As the plot becomes more convoluted, the tone more overripe and the performances heedlessly over-the-top, the picture digs its own film noir grave -- all look and no substance.
09/14/06
This muddled late-career meditation on Hollywood artifice and ambition only captures brief flashes of the director's former glory. The rest just feels like a bad joke.
09/14/06
If only the story could have the same grimy buildup as the windows through which Brian De Palma looks with voyeuristic glee. He makes the final act a graphic tumble into mayhem that focuses only on the tragedy's sex and blood, not its mental anguish.
09/14/06
There are so many missteps in Brian De Palma's THE BLACK DAHLIA that one hardly knows where to start
09/14/06
Plot threads get tangled in a florid web of confusion, and the cast's tawdry, melodramatic antics often evoke unintentional amusement.
09/14/06
A gorgeous, glorious tribute to old Hollywood and crime noir that's only marred by a confounding ending.
09/13/06
It's an old-fashioned noir made in the gallows-smirk spirit of L.A. Confidential.
09/13/06
A stylish but oddly flat exercise in noir conventions, a homage that doesn't so much honor its models as alternately embalm and ridicule them.
09/13/06
There's something irresistible about this convoluted puzzler, a bracing who-dunnit-ness that has its female leads to thank for its sleazy fancy.
09/13/06
The Black Dahlia case was already the basis for an excellent, infinitely-better fictionalized film built around it, 1981's True Confessions starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall.
09/12/06
De Palma's Black Dahlia captures exactly what I see in my head when I read James Ellroy's novels.
09/12/06
Too ragged a film translation from the book and the headlines, far from fully satisfying, but a tour de force of style and mood.
09/12/06
The tragedy of Black Dahlia is that there is no finality for anyone--solving the "mystery," so to speak, counts for next-to-nothing.
09/11/06
Not about the horrific murder and lacks erotic appeal. Hartnett cries a lot. De Palma kills the golden goose.
09/11/06
De Palma and Ellroy - for the most part it's a marriage made in noir nirvana.
09/08/06
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