Curator Watchlist
A gorgeously mounted neo-noir with strong atmosphere, period detail, and De Palma’s signature visual flourishes, but it’s also notoriously overplotted and emotionally distant. Best approached as a style-first, fever-dream crime melodrama rather than a clean mystery.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 2h 1m
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart
In 1940s Los Angeles, two former boxers-turned-cops must grapple with corruption, narcissism, stag films and family madness as they pursue the killer of an aspiring young actress.
Brian De Palma
Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart
A gorgeously mounted neo-noir with strong atmosphere, period detail, and De Palma’s signature visual flourishes, but it’s also notoriously overplotted and emotionally distant. Best approached as a style-first, fever-dream crime melodrama rather than a clean mystery.
The Black Dahlia is a movie built from obsession: with old Hollywood, with corruption, with beauty as a trap, and with the way a murder mystery can curdle into a nightmare. Brian De Palma leans hard into the artificiality of the setting, turning 1940s Los Angeles into a polished, rotten dreamscape where every surface seems to hide another lie.
What lingers most is the mood. The production design, cinematography, and De Palma’s set-piece instincts give the film a decadent, haunted quality, and the cast is often more compelling as icons in a bad dream than as fully lived-in people. That said, the story is tangled to the point of self-sabotage, and the emotional throughline never quite locks in.
If you’re in the mood for a noir that feels feverish, sleazy, and self-aware, there’s enough here to admire. If you want a mystery that steadily tightens its grip, this one tends to slip through your fingers.
Branson Reese · 715 likes
That Brandy Jensen tweet about how Jessica Biel can't be in period pieces because she has a face that knows about cell phones also applies to Josh Hartnett. If anything, it's even worse for him. He's got a face that knows about Barenaked Ladies and Razor Scooters.
nathaxnne [goodbye <3] (4.5★) · 402 likes
The Black Dahlia is not the kind of film that gets made by accident or by noble failure, but with great purpose and alacrity. The Black Dahlia is pure acid satire, the rotten, putrid collapse of a pathetic reality into an even more pathetic fiction, with nothing left in the end. Reality is stage-managed badly in The Black Dahlia, capable of manipulation, of plot and counterplot, for ends venal, trivial, nonsensical. The Black Dahlia has no pretense to realism, not
Josh Lewis (3★) · 368 likes
[Extremely Brian De Palma voice] "What's a sexy girl like you so sad about?" More like L.A. Noire the game than Ellroy, but idk I like L.A. Noire.
Patrick Willems (1.5★) · 356 likes
Great director, great source material, very very bad movie
Jake Cole (5★) · 202 likes
Golden hues turn flat-out angelic when they light up Johansson, though they also project a shadow behind her that looks like the outline of those too close to ground zero of a nuclear strike. The son of a Kraut immigrant knows before his superior officers come to him to fix an exhibition match that he has to use to his all-American partner and friend. That same man feels an empathy for the people of color terrorized by a local killer,
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neo-noir, period crime drama, psychological thriller, 1940s Los Angeles, corruption, obsession, mystery, melodrama, stylized visuals, dark Hollywood