Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
76
(500) Days of Summer
49
2012
60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
70
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
52
Blind Side
47
Box, The
61
Capitalism: A Love Story
55
Christmas Carol, A
43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
23
Couples Retreat
39
Fame
30
Final Destination, The
34
Fourth Kind, The
41
G-Force
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
28
Pandorum
58
Pirate Radio
39
Planet 51
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
46
Twilight Saga: New Moon, The
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
58
(Untitled)
96
35 Shots of Rum
56
Adam
39
Adventures of Power
66
Afterschool
73
Amreeka
49
Antichrist
76
Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86
Beaches of Agnes, The
71
Big Fan
65
Black Dynamite
76
Bliss
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
44
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
Bright Star
76
Broken Embraces
70
Bronson
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
60
Collapse
82
Cove, The
75
Crude
82
Damned United, The
53
Dare
50
Defamation
67
Departures
70
Earth Days
85
Education, An
55
Endgame
88
Fantastic Mr. Fox
31
Fix
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
xx
From Mexico with Love
28
Gentlemen Broncos
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo
63
Horse Boy, The
74
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
26
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
43
Little Traitor, The
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
46
Love Hurts
84
Maid, The
45
Mammoth
75
Messenger, The
55
Missing Person, The
59
More Than a Game
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
48
New York, I Love You
66
No Impact Man
26
Oh My God
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
79
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
73
Red Cliff
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
65
Skin
41
Splinterheads
42
Staten Island
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
58
Storm
82
Sun, The
49
Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
73
That Evening Sun
61
Trucker
49
Turning Green
83
U2 3D
45
Uncertainty
67
Visual Acoustics
32
War on Kids
67
Way We Get By, The
65
Wedding Song, The
xx
White on Rice
59
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
74
Woman in Berlin, A
43
Women in Trouble
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Femme Fatale
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 31 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 26 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Suspense/Thriller
Written by: Brian De Palma
Directed by: Brian De Palma
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 6, 2002
DVD: March 25, 2003
Running Time: 110 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / France
Summary
RATING: R for strong sexuality, violence and language
Starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq Ebouaney, Edouard Montoute, Rie Rasmussen, and Thierry Frémont
A contemporary film noir about an alluring seductress suddenly exposed to the world -- and her enemies -- by a voyeuristic photographer who becomes ensnared in her surreal quest for revenge. (Warner Bros.)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Mission to Mars Mission: Impossible Redacted Scarface Snake Eyes The Black Dahlia
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
This is pure filmmaking, elegant and slippery. I haven't had as much fun second-guessing a movie since "Mulholland Drive."
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis
Here, the message is the moviemaking and the unparalleled joy you get from a film that can carry you off so completely, making you forget about everything save for the beautiful lies in front of you.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly John Powers
I haven't admired a De Palma film since "Carrie," or even enjoyed one since "Scarface," so it must mean something that Femme Fatale gave me one of the best times at the movies I've had this year.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Charles Taylor
In his dazzling and luxuriant new thriller Femme Fatale, De Palma turns trash into chic. It's a sexy, violent, glamorous, sinfully funny movie with a surface as hard and brilliant as diamonds.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Much like David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," which it resembles in more ways than one, Femme Fatale makes a rich bouillabaisse out of De Palma's trademark themes and obsessions, stacking references to the heavens and operating with an internal logic that may take several viewings to fully unpack.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
The story, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is pretentious and banal, closer to "Vanilla Sky" than "Notorious." But Mr. De Palma proves that, in the absence of insight or ideas, some amazing things are possible. It is possible, for instance, to be entranced by a movie without believing it for a second.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
If you decide at the outset that this needn't have any recognizable relationship to the world we live in, you might even find it an unadulterated delight.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
A triumph of style over logic. Although this is not necessarily a good thing, it works spectacularly in this instance.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
It's hard to call it thrilling -- these aren't characters you actually care about and De Palma isn't as concerned with building tension as playing visual games -- but it sure sparkles.
Read Full Review >Variety Lisa Nesselson
An extravagant suspense cocktail of wacky and lascivious ingredients that goes down fine.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Peter Rainer
It's a pure (guilty) pleasure trip. That's pleasure, De Palma–style -- twisted, dirty, voyeuristic, a vast glissando of amorality.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Fatale is, truthfully, a mess - an absurdly overwritten Eurotrash thriller that beggars an audience's suspension of disbelief. It's also great over-the-top moviemaking if you're in a slap-happy mood.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Viewers who like their movies to adhere to some sort of reasonable logic, or to at least make sense, will not be pleased by Femme Fatale. For everyone else, it's playtime.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Femme Fatale is glossy, glamorous cinema as collage. Maybe all the pieces of a truly good film noir are here, but the filmmaker has opted simply to toss them into the air and let them fall where they may.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The film is De Palma's tribute to film noir, to Paris and to the cinema itself.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Sexy, witty, energetic and gorgeous, but it is as stripped of the human element (in some of its production design, as well) as a minimalist Calvin Klein store.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Darrin Keene
This is a return to form for De Palma, director of ambitious thriller fare like "Dressed to Kill" and "Body Double." Like those films, this one ends in a rather contrived fashion, but it’s a fun ride.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann
Sexy and passably entertaining, with a plot that's too clever by half.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
Even if it's accepted simply as glitter-sprayed trash, sophomorically plotted and incompetently acted, Femme Fatale is a uniquely De Palma kind of effluence, an exercise in auteur self-parody.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
A tricksy meta-thriller that, replete with the requisite homage to "Vertigo," sustains its dreamlike glide through a succession of cheesy coincidences and voluptuous cheap effects.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
A passionate film buff's valentine to the two directors he loves most: Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. The film that this worship has inspired is pretty amusing when the director apes Hitchcock, and pretty awful when he apes himself.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
May not always make sense, but it's crammed with flamboyant images and frisky cinematic pranks -- It's far from a great movie, but there's nothing like it on the current scene.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Elegant nonsense. For some years, it's been clear that De Palma's work has lost the jolting intellectual energy and wit of his "Carrie" and "Dressed to Kill" days, and in Femme Fatale the Master is just diddling. [25 November 2002, p. 108]
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Starts with a flourish, staggers along for a bit and finally collapses -- even die-hard De Palma fans, will be left hungry.
Film Threat Don R. Lewis
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is just plain HOT in this film and other than that...we got ourselves a stinker.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
"Double Indemnity's" darkly poetic carnality is timeless. Trashy, throwaway fluff like De Palma's film can only look bad by comparison.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Nothing short of a disaster -– easily one of the worst movies of the year.
Read Full Review >New York Post Megan Lehmann
De Palma fools around with split screens and slo-mo, but no amount of cinematic artifice can varnish over the fact that this is simply a bad film.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Mainly, Femme Fatale is really about De Palma's three favorite things: women, movies and women. And you can either share his guilty pleasures in all their living, breathing, power-edited, overextended glory, or you can get on with your life.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
It tries hard to be sexy, mysterious and dangerous, but ends up laughably inscrutable.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
If you look hard, you can make out a story in Femme Fatale, but it has nothing to do with the senseless pileup of jewel thievery, shutterbug voyeurism, and leggy sex bombs so shallow and bad they seem to have come out of a 1978 copy of Hustler magazine.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.9 (out of 10) based on 26 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Frank O. gave it a5:
Had great hopes for this movie but DePalma just couldn't pull it off...too long, a waste of Peter Coyote's skills as an actor.
Jack gave it a 10:
Great meta-thriller, with the usual DePalma hijinks, choreography and tongue-in-cheek preposterousness.
Elijah gave it a 10:
Gorgeous and trashy, Femme Fatale is the most exhilarating thing you could possibly have seen in the theaters last year. Even if it doesn't completely hold up in the end, it is a beautiful exercise in style featuring a marriage of images and music that will stay with you for the rest of your life. DePalma shows his genius behind the camera here better than he ever has. Highly, highly recommended.
Yoon Min C. gave it an 8:
Empty but full-bodied exercise in cinema, far sleeker and more supple than DePalma's stylistic excesses of the late 70s and early 80s, more confident and masterly as a genre piece, and more elegant as a reshuffling of formula along new contours, and highly captivating as a splicing of noir with mysticism, this is perhaps DePalma's best since Carlito's Way, and certainly redeems his standing after the sheer inanity of Mission to Mars. Actually, both Mission and Femme show us a master in action, and both exceed the boundaries of formualic conventions by stepping into metaphysical territory; but whereas Mission inflates into New Age schlock, Femme Fatale is sinuous and lean, brutally seductive, thereby allowing for more satisfying visceral pleasure and titillating occultish speculations. It's best appreciated as a game, played by Depalma and appreciated by knowing cineastes; not so much the mystery of the story but the construction of action and suspense, and the machinations of the plot. Those who find this hollow have a point; it's not deep and perhaps even stupid and the material is tired just as the notion of the femme fatale; but DePalma's approach is fresh and his command of the medium is masterful and total, and at the very least it deserves praise as a feat of brilliant craftsmanship. Banderas is engaging, Stamos is venomously sexy, and the villains are truly menacing.
Zeljko M. gave it a 2:
Awfull!
Jon K. gave it a 0:
Absolute trash. Plot holes the size of craters, absolutely atrocious acting across the board, and De Palma's love of cripplingly illogical plotlines combine to make this half-baked monstrosity damn-near unwatchable. Casting supermodels in lead acting roles is a questionable tactic at the best of times; in this movie, Romijn-Stamos works extremely hard at looking good while doing nothing with what little she has to work with. Any one of the multiple plot twists that can only be characterized as childish would have ruined the movie; together, they weigh it down like stones in a sack. Being insulted by people is bad enough. But being insulted by movies...folks, that's just beneath our human dignity.
Richard gave it a 7:
A crock, but an entertaining one for the most part. People have been comparing this to "Mulholland Drive," but Naomi Watts is a much more compelling actress than Romijn-Stamos, and I think it's her performance that keeps the film from being entirely successful. Banderas is much more interesting as a shlub, although his swishy act in the middle of the film struck me as curious. Overall, it's a beautiful film to watch, especially the opening heist sequence, but the points it seems to want to make about choices and possible futures is ultimately undercut by its heroine's lackluster acting.
