What makes it even more fascinating is that it is a remake of sorts of Antonioni's Blow Up and when looking at the difference between both films, you can clearly see the difference between art cinema and the more commercial cinema. But instead of comercial cinema being portrayed as talentless, this is also a great film that stands next to Blow Up like a brother. I think there are some great works being made in comercial films by guys like Speilberg and De Palma that will hold up in a respectable way.
My favorite though is the highly underrated Femme Fatale, which incorporates De Palma's masterful directing into a story best suited for it.
~rougerum
I also see some striking similarities that would render
Blow Out a cinematic sibling of
The Conversation; in fact, De Palma's film may be the last of the great American political-paranoia films, which maybe began with Pakula's films in the earlier seventies (I'm not an expert on this, I'm just going from what I've seen).
Oddly, Spielberg (whom I cannot stand) is friends with De Palma, or at least he was during the writing of Julie Salmon's
The Devil's Candy, in which their friendship- and their radically different perspectives on the motivations and art of making cinema- are gone into in some pretty interesting, albeit brief, detail.
Lastly, Gold Trumpet, I think your
Femme Fatale vote got made into a
Mission to Mars vote when Maguffin kindly added
Carlito's Way to the poll... I hate to pester Maguffin, but... could you switch his vote back?