Blow Out

press release:

FRI., 8/26, 7 p.m. DRESSED TO KILL: USA | 1980 | DCP | 105 min.

Director: Brian De Palma; Cast: Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen

Shortly after visiting her shrink (Caine), a frustrated housewife (Dickinson) impulsively sleeps with a stranger, and, soon after, is brutally murdered. A prostitute (director DePalma’s then wife Allen) who witnesses the crime faces her own perils when she teams up with the victim’s son (director-to-be Keith Gordon) to trap the killer. De Palma’s operatic riff on Hitchcock has, in the 30 years since its first release, become a classic in its own right.

FRI., 8/26, 9 p.m. BLOW OUT: USA | 1981 | DCP | 107 min.

Director: Brian De Palma; Cast: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow

Travolta plays a sound-effects man with proof that a politician’s death was the result of a labyrinthine blackmail plot. De Palma’s mix of Antonioni, Hitchcock and the Zapruder film has been cited by Quentin Tarantino as one of his biggest cinematic inspirations. “It’s hallucinatory, and it has a dreamlike clarity and inevitability, but you’ll never make the mistake of thinking it’s only a dream. It’s a great movie” (Pauline Kael).

Brian De Palma Thrills Us! series: Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s new documentary De Palma combines interviews and film clips to take us deep into the life and work of Brian De Palma, master of the contemporary thriller and one of American cinema’s most expressive, eclectic, and personal filmmakers. In his New York Times review De Palma, critic A.O. Scott writes “It’s almost hard to believe that he could have made so many wild, haunting and provocative movies, but by the end of the documentary, you may want nothing more than to see them all.” While not a complete retrospective, this series provides you the opportunity to see the first theatrical screening of De Palma in Madison, plus 10 of Brian De Palma’s very best features, several of which will be shown on original 35mm prints.