“Murders have continued almost unabated [in his films], and at 66, Brian De Palma has been at it a long time, since the mid-’60s. While the other major directors of his generation — Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola — have ranged high and low, De Palma keeps hitting the same groove. Like Hitchcock, to whom he has often been compared, and not always favorably, his name represents a brand. [But] even in a film as roundly slammed and wildly unsatisfactory as The Black Dahlia, there are moments when De Palma’s ecstatic love of filmmaking comes through. But his ardor can be a mixed blessing. De Palma’s technique alone can hold you, but sometimes we must ask: technique in the service of what?” — one of the few portions in Peter Rainer‘s longish, well-written piece about De Palma in today’s L.A. Times that I agree with wholeheartedly.