***
Psychiatric patient kills the wrong woman (Angie Dickinson) at the wrong time, drawing the ire of her teenage techo-geek son (Keith Gordon) and the pretty hooker (Nancy Allen) who can ID the killer. Well-directed by De Palma (with a long bravura sequence without dialogue set in New York's Metropolitan Museum), and deeply indebted to Alfred Hitchcock, though unfortunately not in one important respect: Hitchcock didn't write his own scripts. This one flounders at the climax, and the foolish denoument is not only overlong but also out of character. With Michael Caine as a psychiatrist and Dennis Franz as a cop. The unrated version includes a few more seconds of somewhat more explicit sex, violence, and language, none of which adds anything of any real value to the film.
Psychiatric patient kills the wrong woman (Angie Dickinson) at the wrong time, drawing the ire of her teenage techo-geek son (Keith Gordon) and the pretty hooker (Nancy Allen) who can ID the killer. Well-directed by De Palma (with a long bravura sequence without dialogue set in New York's Metropolitan Museum), and deeply indebted to Alfred Hitchcock, though unfortunately not in one important respect: Hitchcock didn't write his own scripts. This one flounders at the climax, and the foolish denoument is not only overlong but also out of character. With Michael Caine as a psychiatrist and Dennis Franz as a cop. The unrated version includes a few more seconds of somewhat more explicit sex, violence, and language, none of which adds anything of any real value to the film.