JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

BeSummers Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Nick Duguay Second time watching and I chose the Director's Cut this time. And I've got to say, I much prefer it. Quite a hallucinatory experience. Once again, this film held my attention throughout and just flew by. It's absolutely hilarious but also suspenseful and, at times, terrifying. Meshing comedy with horror can be quite a difficult task, so this film is obviously firing on all cylinders. Visually stunning, better pacing throughout the director's edition, wonderful score, and a dreamlike atmosphere. All of these things add up to make a film that's really quite appealing despite what others have said.

moonspinner55 Brian De Palma should never be left to his own devices. Working alongside a creative support team, the talented director still manages to borrow from every manual in the book, yet his films are usually entertaining. Left to himself, as he is here, the results become a torpid series of sticky hijinks--a grab-bag of ideas taken not just from De Palma's heroes, but blatant steals from his own pictures! John Lithgow has been preconditioned to give a bravura actor's turn as a child psychologist whose personality has been 'split' by his nefarious mad-doctor father; when Lithgow spies his unsatisfied wife having an affair with a former flame, he goes off the deep end, resulting in a series of incoherent violent attacks aided by a trouble-making twin brother who doesn't really exist. Cinematographer Stephen H. Burum does some interesting things with his camera, and yet the art direction lets him down (the colors congeal and the film ends up looking chintzy, a problem Burum had earlier on "Body Double", also a De Palma film). Lithgow cackles, acts the hipster, dresses in drag, the works. However, all these fancy tricks--and De Palma's silly scare theatrics--cannot save the picture from doing a fast fade. *1/2 from ****

Adam Foidart "Raising Cain" is a thriller that's so misguided in its direction that I'm not 100% sure if telling you about the premise is a spoiler or not. I'm going to say that it isn't because there's a casting choice early on that makes the "twist" incredibly obvious but I apologize in advance if for some reason you feel like I end up ruining the movie for you. Like I said, I don't think this is spoiling anything when I tell you the movie is about a guy with multiple personality disorder that is kidnapping children for his father's experiments. OK, maybe that's a big vague. Let's back up. John Lithgow plays Carter Nix, a respected psychologist that is taking time off from his practice to help raise his daughter while his wife Jenny (Lolita Davidovich) keeps working. There's something not quite right about Carter though. The attention he gives to his daughter borders on obsessive and when his "twin brother" suddenly appears outside of his car window, Cain reveals that the two have been working on a sinister plan fit for a mad genius. Their father, long-thought dead (also played by John Lithgow) is looking to collect children so that he can experiment the effects of abuse on their minds. He wants to kidnap children, traumatize them and study them afterward, hoping to create examples of multiple personality disorder and document what his "research" uncovers. That's a pretty crazy story, but what is really affecting Carter is Jenny's old flame Jack (Steven Bauer) has suddenly re-entering her life. Her marriage vows are looking a lot less appealing now that this hunk has bumped into her and with this added stress, it's enough to drive a man mad!While watching the movie, I was just confused. Is casting John Lithgow as multiple members of his family supposed to be done so that we think they're real people, or are we supposed to think they're hallucinations? If it was supposed to be a twist that he and his brother are in fact, the same person, why not cast other people in the role? There's nothing about their relationship that makes them being "twins" necessary, so why this choice? Most thrillers dealing with imaginary friends, little voices in people's heads telling them to go bananas or multiple personality disorders choose two different actors to play the roles in order to avoid suspicion. If it's not supposed to be a twist, why do they play it as a big revelation that he's a crazy person? There are some casting choices here and some revelations in the end of the film that support the idea that it's supposed to be a twist and others that say it isn't, making the movie very difficult to review without spoiling anything. Maybe that's just me though. Maybe I'm a dummy and I just read somewhere that this movie was about a multiple personalities and just didn't catch all of the red herrings, or maybe this movie was meant to be so obvious that it would throw people off. Even if that's the case, the movie directed very strangely. There are multiple scenes where characters are shown doing some pretty extreme things that would shock the people they know and love, but then they turn out to be dreams. Then the next scene turns out to be a flashback, followed by another dream. There's no way to determine what is what and who is sane in this movie so it just becomes confusing and annoying.If you watch the film, you will really question the behavior of some characters. The police are particularly ineffective in this film and jump to all sorts of crazy conclusions when it's convenient for a character to be captured, but when someone needs to escape or get away so that they can confront another character or make a dramatic entrance later in the film, the security becomes incredibly lax. There is a pretty cool escape sequence where Carter manages to sneak out of a building unnoticed, but even then he drops the ball by removing his shoes and just walking around barefoot. Yes he changed his clothes so no one would recognize him, but walking around without any protection for your toes? That's just a bad move. Was he concerned that the police would recognize his footprints, but not his face? There are some minor plot holes you can point out too, but it's not the little details that make this movie bad, it's the overall story, the way it's set up and particularly the casting. John Lithgow does a fine job, even when his role calls for some embarrassing stuff. Throughout the film, it just feels like something is wrong though. It feels like certain roles were chosen to be played by John Lithgow not because he suited the role, but because it would make for a "shocking reveal" later in the movie. It's not his fault he's in a mess of a film, it's the casting director's, and Brian De Palma's for letting him/her get away with it.I realize I'm being overwhelmingly negative about the movie, but it really isn't all that bad. It's just profoundly misguided and overall not anything special. I can't quite recommend it, though if you've seen it ahead of time and you want to really screw with your friends' minds, watch this one back-to-back with a movie where a character has multiple personalities and it's a genuine twist. Watch this one second and watch their brains deflate like a balloon out of confusion. It's never boring, that's something good to be said about it and there are some genuinely thrilling moments here too, but it's just nothing you should rush out to see or will remember very well once it's all over, except maybe for the last shot of the movie, which is particularly ridiculous. (On DVD, January 19, 2014)

ShootingShark Carter Nix seems to be a devoted husband and father, but behind this facade lurks a shady past and some decidedly odd relations. When Carter's twisted brother Cain shows up and some local children go missing, can the police figure out what's going on in time ?Brian DePalma's best films are just so deliciously twisted, and in my view this is one of his very best. There are at least five fantastic aaaaahhhhh moments in it; the comatose wife awaking from her slumber at the wrong moment, Carter abruptly smothering Jenny with the pillow, the shocking twist on the old car-in-the-swamp Psycho moment, Jenny's sudden appearance on the baby monitor, Margot headbutting Dr Waldheim. All of these are beautifully, lovingly stylised, but the whole movie is just full of fantastic sequences, culminating in the terrific showdown at the motel. It also has a completely outstanding four-minute shot in the middle walking through the cop-shop, where Sternhagen ploughs through a ton of back-story, hits about a thousand marks (including some intentionally wrong ones) and emotes like there's no tomorrow. If ever you hear some phony-baloney actor type spouting off about have to struggle to find their character, show them this scene - Sternhagen is wild, funny, gripping, irascible, scared, intriguing and intense, all at the same time. Better yet, Lithgow is equally sensational, playing five characters with terrific abandon, weedy one moment, terrifying the next. Okay, so DePalma may have trodden this ground before (Sisters, Dressed To Kill, Body Double), but nobody does these crazy, sexy, twisty-turny thrillers as well as he does, and the cinematic power of these incredible set-pieces is just astonishing. Here's a movie where not a moment is wasted, where every shot is both artfully composed and intrinsically important, where every nuance the actors can provide contributes to the mood and the shocks. It's simply fantastic from start to finish. With a terrific score by Pino Donaggio (the music makes me scream every time) and fabulous photography throughout from Stephen H. Burum, this is a masterclass is technical filmmaking. Produce by Gale Anne Hurd (of Terminator fame) and brilliantly written and directed by DePalma, this is a great, gleeful, creepy, exciting, shocking, fantastically well-executed thriller.