Femme Fatale

Brian De Palma’s films are a treat for people who watch a lot of movies, and Femme Fatale is no exception. Starting with an excerpt from Double Indemnity – the bit where Barbara Stanwyck is telling Fred MacMurray that she’s “rotten to the heart” – it then replays a similar scenario, with a tweak, in the modern (2002) era, with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (as she was at the time) in the “femme fatale” role and Antonio Banderas as the guy trying to hang on to his testicles. Romijn-Stamos plays a very bad woman indeed, and in typically playful, relentlessly referential De Palma style the action starts at the Cannes film festival where her badass Laure is … Read more