We all know that Brian De Palma learned his trade from one of the masters of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Even if some of his films are horror, his basic genre has always been the thriller, pared down to a Hitchcockian mystery. While it was "The Untouchables" that put him in the major league of Hollywood filmmakers, placing him among the three or four most gifted and accomplished filmmakers in America, Brian De Palma has consistently been associated with the thriller. In many of his thrillers, De Palma showed great talent for creating extremely suspenseful scenes. The key territory that he works with have been supernatural horror movies ("Carrie," "The Fury"), psycho-killer thrillers ("Dressed to Kill," "Body Double"), conspiracy suspense movies ("Blow Out," "Mission: Impossible") and gangster films ("Scarface," "The Untouchables," "Carlito's Way").

In "Femme Fatale" Brian De Palma returns to his thriller excellence.

"Femme Fatal" is deluxe entertainment, a return to conventional film-making. Avoiding the greasy stain of exploitation that some film-makers might encounter in a similar film, "Femme Fatale" is original as well as commercial.

The film tells the story of a dangerous woman playing with dangerous people. The woman screws up a dangerous criminal. And for that, she needs to vanish. How she's going to do that? Take another woman's identity and start all over? But does a woman like that, a femme fatale, know how to get out of trouble? Will she take another chance? Another moral decision?

Another fatal attraction steams up the screen: Antonio Banderas. Banderas plays a paparazzo with an always-handy camera in his hands. A hard guy with a hot, sexy motorbike and the latest technology for stalking…. All this in company with brilliant directing, a clear plotline, cinematography that makes everything clear with just a few angles, a few shots or with slow motion. Perfect... and expensive!

Femme Fatale, directed by Brian De Palma, 2002.