Brian de Palma's Blow Out gets a Criterion release

I always direct people who don't like Brian de Palma towards one film, Blow Out, a masterful metacinematic thriller about American paranoia, which manages to collapse into one story the Kennedy assassination, the Chappaquidick bridge incident, the origins of cinema, and the exploitation of women, all the while presenting an engaging thriller that plays like the audio-voyeur's equivalent of Antonioni's Blow Up. It's his most rewarding, most engaging work - despite one of the cruellest endings in a mainstream American movie - and I'm most happy the new Criterion edition comes at a time when I might have naturally been getting around to it again. Cool extras, too, including a new interview of de Palma and his apparent first feature, Murder à la Mod, which also features an icepick killer. The Criterion site has further essays on the film, for instance, here.