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Femme Fatale
Metascore
59 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 30 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 16 out of 30
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 30
  3. Negative: 5 out of 30
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  1. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    100
    This is pure filmmaking, elegant and slippery. I haven't had as much fun second-guessing a movie since "Mulholland Drive."
  2. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Charles Taylor
    90
    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.
  3. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: John Powers
    90
    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.
  4. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    90
    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.
  5. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Scott Tobias
    80
    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.
  6. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    80
    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.
  7. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    80
    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.
  8. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    78
    A triumph of style over logic. Although this is not necessarily a good thing, it works spectacularly in this instance.
  9. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker
    75
    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.
  10. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    70
    It's a pure (guilty) pleasure trip. That's pleasure, De Palma–style -- twisted, dirty, voyeuristic, a vast glissando of amorality.
  11. Variety
    Reviewed by: Lisa Nesselson
    70
    An extravagant suspense cocktail of wacky and lascivious ingredients that goes down fine.
  12. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    63
    The film is De Palma's tribute to film noir, to Paris and to the cinema itself.
  13. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
    63
    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.
  14. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jami Bernard
    63
    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.
  15. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    63
    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.
  16. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    63
    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.
  17. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    50
    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.
  18. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Edward Guthmann
    50
    Sexy and passably entertaining, with a plot that's too clever by half.
  19. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    50
    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.
  20. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    50
    Starts with a flourish, staggers along for a bit and finally collapses -- even die-hard De Palma fans, will be left hungry.
    All this critic's reviews
  21. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: J. Hoberman
    50
    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.
  22. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Stephen Hunter
    50
    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.
  23. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: David Denby
    50
    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]
    All this critic's reviews
  24. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    40
    "Double Indemnity's" darkly poetic carnality is timeless. Trashy, throwaway fluff like De Palma's film can only look bad by comparison.
  25. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Don R. Lewis
    40
    Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is just plain HOT in this film and other than that...we got ourselves a stinker.
  26. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Megan Lehmann
    38
    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.
  27. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    38
    Nothing short of a disaster -– easily one of the worst movies of the year.
  28. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    30
    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.
  29. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    25
    It tries hard to be sexy, mysterious and dangerous, but ends up laughably inscrutable.
  30. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    0
    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.
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