Cinema: Bad Crash

BLOW OUT Directed and Written by Brian De Palma

There are three Brian De Palmas—all the grinning, scheming sons of Alfred Hitchcock. With Sisters and Dressed to Kill, De Palma made his reputation as the Psycho student supreme, drawing curlicues of style and cheerfully obscene graffiti in the margins of that seminal horror-movie text. In Phantom of the Paradise and Home Movies, he displayed an impish, impudent sense of humor that recalls Hitchcock's macabre comedy The Trouble with Harry. But the most passionate Brian De Palma—and maybe the real one—is the...