Dressed to Kill (1980) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by Will Menaker ★★★★ 7

  My favorite part of this movie is that Michael Caine's therapist character is repeatedly propositioned for sex by his female clients who all ask him "don't you want to fuck me doc?" and his response is always "absolutely!"

• Review by The Voluptuous Horror of Sally Jane Black 42

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  If you've been following along, you can probably guess what I hated about this. De Palma's style is great. He's got this slick, noirish feel that makes good use of shadow and reflection and odd angles to drive the intensity of any given scene, but almost right away, I predicted his big twist. And, of course, the twist left a sour taste in my mouth. All the Hitchcockian references, all the gloriously bloody murders, all the weird inventions by the hapless kid that could make this a great film seem wasted by the transphobic plotline.

  The list of films that commit this sin is a long one. [SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR OTHER FILMS--I CAN'T SAY WHICH ONES WITHOUT SPOILING THINGS ABOUT…

• Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★ 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  What if Psycho but way more perverted and problematic? Love it.

• Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★★★ 4

  A hooker and a geek join forces to end transphobia once and for all but they only make it worse.

• Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 13

  93/100

  The opening of Dressed to Kill, with its soft-core seduction and luscious yet calculated imagery, is Brian De Palma grasping his fundamental characteristics and shrinking them into a singular sequence of delight and horror. A woman, standing naked in the shower, is watching her husband shave behind the foggy glass, and as dreams morph into fantasies and nightmares, we as an audience witness an entire history of a relationship through sensual gestures and primal fixations.

  It is this woman, played by Angie Dickinson, who De Palma takes not as his main subject but as a flirtatious prisoner of sorts. Cutting from the opening sequence, we see Kate having sex with her husband in an unromantic and unsatisfying fashion, and…

• Review by Hari Nef 10

  dear brian de palma,

  let's link and build King. too soon for a remake? jason weinberg is my manager--do you know each other? he takes care of melanie griffith, whom you worked with on 'the bonfire of the vanities.' i think you'd just Adore me--as an actress, i mean! after all, i am a brunette

  love,
  hari

• Review by Ella Kemp ★★½

  Ooohhhh my name is Brian De Palma did you know I know what a split diopter is

• Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  For better (and in some cases worse) De Palma takes Psycho into the realm of giallo; pushing it to its trashiest, most fetishistic possible extreme. Literally opens and closes on a perverse remix of the famous shower scene—one played as an explicit sexual fantasy, the other as trauma. The museum scene to the elevator kill is among his finest visual suspense sequences, the shot of Allen catching a brief glimpse of the wide-angle mirror is one of the straight-up scariest shots in his catalog of them.

  Full discussion on episode 130 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

• Review by Scott Tobias ★★★★½ 2

  Problematic fav.

• Review by sydney ★★★★ 5

  I like the acknowledgment of how tough it is to be a gal, the sympathetic look into an older woman's desires, the touched-upon-but-not-fully-developed issues of victim blaming, the confusions of masculinity and femininity. That all this is done from such a ~sexy~ male point of view is...questionable, as is, obviously, the implications of the ending. But the gender politics should be dissected by someone smarter and more knowledgeable than me.

  Leave all of that out of the equation, and you still have a beautiful thriller that pulls off being campy AND scary AND exciting AND emotional all at once. Elegant exploitation.

  De Palma had a Hitchcock marathon, watched a few 70's Argento films, drank a bottle of whiskey, passed out...and this film is us watching his dreams. The "rip off or homage?" debate is valid, but I like to think that he saw the sexuality just begging to be let out in Hitchcock's films, and decided to set it free.

• Review by kailey ★★★½ 18

  brian de palma be like: cool shit, camera angles, dumb shit, sex!!!!, more cool shit, tension, sex!!!!!!!!!!!!!, pseudo-Freudian shit, confusing shit, more dumb shit, sex!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  add a bowl of steaming hitchcock, a pinch of red, and (unfortunately) some problematic and outdated stereotypes about trans-people. stir.

• Review by sarah squirm ★★★ 2

  i think we can all agree with what went wrong here

  but we can all agree that it looked fabulous!!!

  rewatching the met scene as we speak....