SnoopyStyle Mystery woman Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn) and her accomplices steal a valuable jewel during the Cannes film festival. The heist goes wrong and she escapes with the jewel. In Paris, she's mistaken for her doppelganger Lily by a couple. Laure gets thrown off a balcony by her accomplice Racine. She wakes up after the couple brings her to Lily's apartment. Lily had disappeared after her husband and daughter's deaths. Lily returns home and commits suicide. Laure takes over Lily's identity. She flies to American. On the plane, she catches the eye of Bruce Watts (Peter Coyote). Seven years later, she returns to Paris as the wife of Ambassador Watts. Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) is a paparazzi who gets entangled with her. Her old accomplices Racine and Black Tie are still after her.This has many of the hallmarks of a Brian De Palma film. His style is everywhere. The movie starts with a overly complicated robbery. Then it goes off with so many complicated coincidences that it becomes unbelievable. It becomes an exercise more than a story. There are also a couple of questions about logic. It may be more advantageous to keep the first act a secret from the audience and reveal each secret for shock value. The movie is too complicated for its own good.

hall895 Femme Fatale is a movie which takes its time in really getting going but in the end it's worth the wait. It seemingly starts out as a straightforward heist movie. Rebecca Romijn plays Laure, who's part of a team of thieves who mean to steal a diamond-encrusted bra. They're going to take it right off the model who's wearing it at the Cannes Film Festival. Laure takes the model into the restroom where seduction is on the menu along with theft. But just when Laure and the model, now relieved of her diamonds, are really getting into one another things go awry. Laure disappears with the diamonds. Her partners in crime are not well pleased. Will Laure get away with it? Well, luckily for her a series of events too fortunate to really be believed allows her to get out of France. Less luckily events seven years later conspire to bring Laure back to Paris. Her old partners anxiously await her return. Laure's in trouble and she knows it. Extricating herself from this mess will require an elaborate plan. And a patsy. Enter unwitting photographer Nicolas who finds himself caught up in something beyond his imagination. And something quite dangerous.The opening heist sequence, while very well done, does go on perhaps a little longer than needed. And then the movie has to get Laure out of France and back again. All in all it takes quite a while for the movie to actually set itself up, to get to the real story. It's a complicated, at times convoluted, thriller. The movie is certainly intriguing enough to hold your interest but it does move rather slowly. But writer/director Brian De Palma manages to pay it off in the end. The movie's final twists and turns make the whole thing worthwhile. Everything comes together in quite smart fashion. Yes the movie got bogged down at times along the way but when you see the whole story you appreciate how well De Palma put the pieces of his puzzle together. The performances aren't great. Romijn is certainly not the most talented actress around. But she definitely looks the part of the sexy femme fatale. And her somewhat stiff acting actually kind of fits the role of the ice queen Laure. Antonio Banderas meanwhile seems somewhat bored with the role of Nicolas, he doesn't bring much energy to the proceedings. But he does make Nicolas sympathetic enough that you feel for the guy as Laure toys with him. And toy with him she does in so many ways. Laure is a woman not to be trifled with. Her story is compelling. The way De Palma presents that story borders on genius. Femme Fatale is a movie which keeps you guessing and which ultimately rewards you for sticking with it through its more mundane moments. Not an ordinary heist movie or a run-of-the-mill thriller. This is a movie with smarts, one which packs a surprising punch.

Desertman84 Femme Fatale is a mystery film stars Rebecca Romijn in the title role together with Antonio Banderas,Peter Coyote,Eriq Ebouaney and Rie Rasmussen.Director Brian De Palma blends the emotional netherworld of film noir with a stylish portrayal of life among the wealthy and powerful in Paris in this glossy thriller.Laure Ash is a beautiful but mysterious woman who has aligned herself with a small ring of jewel thieves, led by a man known as Black Tie, who has planned a major score during the Cannes Film Festival. Sexy model Veronica is scheduled to make a spectacular entrance for the screening of director Regis Wargnier's picture, wearing a body-hugging piece of jewelry worth a cool ten million dollars. Laure approaches the sexually adventurous Veronica and is able to seduce her, while at the same time stealing her diamond-studded outfit and replacing it with a carefully constructed counterfeit. Veronica, however, also makes off the loot without giving her partners their cut, and must go into hiding in order to avoid the wrath of Black Tie and his cohorts. Fate allows Laure to make her way to the United States, where in time she marries a powerful politician. Photographer Nicolas Bardo, however, had snapped a picture of Laure while she was on the lam years before, and when he takes an assignment to get a photo of the camera-shy woman, Laure realizes Nicolas is in a position to reveal her new identity to the world and put the bloodthirsty Black Tie back on her trail.The sheer pleasure of watching movies is celebrated in Brian De Palma's dazzling Femme Fatale. Working from his own intricate screenplay, De Palma indulges all of his trademark obsessions, upping the ante on Hitchcock with a Vertigo-like plot.De Palma's weaving a web of nonsense, but his plotting is so exuberantly absurd--and his frame so full of visual clues and relevant detail--that Femme Fatale becomes a joyous thrill ride at first encounter, and a crazily logical and grandly rewarding movie on subsequent viewings. In her best role to date, Romijnis everything you'd want a femme fatale to be, in a thriller that constantly challenges you to question what you're seeing.

Samiam3 The financial and critical disaster of Brian de Palma's space opera Mission to Mars was probably a good indicator that De Palma is a long way from home in the science fiction genre. (I actually didn't hate the movie, but many people did) For his follow up, de Palma returns to a more familiar genre, the suspenseful thriller in Hitchcock-fashion. For what it is, Femme Fatale is recommendable, but it's not quite a good movie. It is burdened by an inept leading actress and a mediocre screenplay which is over ambitious and low on credibility. Femme Fatale is pretty much a b-movie, but at least it is a watchable one.While the substance may be flimsy, the style is strong. Femme Fatale expresses a love for the art of photography, which can be seen in the frame and in the plot alike. Most of the camera work is quite distinctive. There are a lot of long takes, extreme high and low angles, some with a canted frame. the picture is rich, and heavily saturated, making use of different light sources for different effects. Just occasionally I think Femme Fatale pushes a bit far. De Palma also uses his split screen effect, which is sort of cumbersome, because we the audience are forced to watch both sides of the screen while paying attention to the dialogue. In an attempt to be the best it can be, Femme Fatale has an ending that sort of changes the perspective on the whole picture, and it liable to make an intelligent viewer feel cheated. Femme Fatale is an exercise in the arts and ideas of it's genre but it pushes too far with some details and ignores more important ones. Intelligence and originality are lacking, ergo, This is not a movie for a critical viewer, but it's watchable.