Brian De Palma is the most controversial director to have emerged from the movie brat generation of film school graduates. A misogynist, a genius, a copycat, a cine-literate aesthete, an emotionless technician, all of these epithets have been thrown his way – and they all have some validity. The director’s variable career has ambled from peak to trough, success to flop, controversy to obscurity. Although he’s best known for films with a high body count, he began his career making comedies – Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969) and Hi, Mom! (1970) – and later reinvented the horror film by dreaming up the just-when-you-think-it’s-over coda in Carrie (1976).

De Palma is the closest mainstream American cinema has come to a hip-hop artist; he is a cultural magpie who samples riffs, or rips off samples, from other directors, borrowing plotlines, shots and sequences. The climax of The Untouchables (1987), in which a pram and its infant passenger trip perilously down a set of stone steps amidst a volley of gunfire, is a virtual shot-for-shot remake of the famous Odessa steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). One of De Palma’s most fully conceived films, Blow Out (1981), starring John Travolta as a sound engineer convinced he has recorded evidence of a politician’s murder, is Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) reworked as a paranoid conspiracy thriller. Alfred Hitchcock’s imposing shadow also looms large over the director’s ouevre. De Palma’s Obsession (1976), in which a businessman becomes obsessed with a doppelgänger of his dead wife, is essentially a Vertigo redux. Body Double (1984) is Rear Window meets Vertigo, and Dressed To Kill (1980) adds Psycho to the mix, even opening with a mischievous homage to the film’s infamous shower scene.

The problem with excavating raw material entirely from the vaults of cinematic history is that the resulting work can be ahistorical, amoral and airless. De Palma seems to shrug off any social responsibility, viewing the repeated acts of violence against women in his thrillers in purely technical terms. He was condemned as a misogynist following Body Double and Dressed To Kill, and feminist groups picketed cinemas angry about what they saw as the peephole pleasures of watching women being cut up for entertainment. De Palma has yet to solve the puzzle of how to make a film about voyeurism without making a voyeuristic film, although whether he actually sees that as a problem is another matter. Indeed, he seems to have got some mischievous pleasure out of making the perversely outré Body Double, in which the hero is unapologetically a voyeur and a young, sexually liberated woman is graphically penetrated by a drill.

Even his detractors, however, have to agree that there is a virtuosic élan to every Brian De Palma picture. No matter how uneven the film – and they have been precariously erratic of late – there will always be one redeeming feature, whether it’s Tom Cruise perilously dangling from a wire in Mission: Impossible (1996), the 12-minute tracking shot that audaciously opened Snake Eyes (1998) or the Kubrickian space sequences in Mission To Mars (2000). His bloody masterpiece Scarface (1983) was one glorious set piece after another, ratcheting up the baroque until it became a machine-gun opera. Carlito’s Way (1993) offered him an alternative direction – character-based, low-key, with only the odd welcome flash of bombast – but, sadly, he seems to have declined it.

The accusations of misogyny and vulgar plagiarism have tended to overshadow the director’s avant-garde credentials. However, throughout his career, De Palma has played deft, intellectual games with the linearity of time and the fallibility of human perception. In Sisters (1973), a Bergmanesque thriller about doubles, De Palma’s split screen became an astute technical analogue of the protagonist’s state of mind. Casualties Of War (1989) pulled the rug out from underneath the audience in the very last shot, Raising Cain (1992) toyed capriciously with time’s arrow, and Femme Fatale (2002), packaged as an erotic thriller, owed more to avant-garde writer Jorge Luis Borges than Sharon Stone.

In 2006, critics at the Venice Film Festival loudly trumpeted De Palma’s return to form with The Black Dahlia (2006). But when the hype died down, other reviewers saw it for what it was, an underpowered James Ellroy adaptation with a few dazzling set pieces (including, a career highlight, the discovery of a dead woman’s body) and the most ridiculous, jaw-dropping denouement in recent mainstream American cinema.

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