De Palma shows the kind of restless intelligence which suggests that he will want to work in many different forms, and certainly he needs more chances to work on a larger scale... But he doesn’t have to move away from thrillers to prove he’s an artist.

Dressed To Kill is a nail-biting, seat-squirming, stylish murder mystery with a brain.

Originality has never been a high value in the genre-bound aesthetic of filmmaking, but De Palma cheapens what he steals.

Dressed to Kill is about a lot of things—identity, adultery, sex work, pathology—but it’s also a flashy demo of De Palma’s technical abilities, for better or worse.