Of the 1970s movie brats who became filmmaking brand names during the height of the New Hollywood revolution, Brian De Palma has always been the most divisive. By mining his unhappy childhood for storytelling material, De Palma quickly established himself as a technically brilliant formalist and a powerfully provocative moralist. De Palma is also the greatest filmmaker to have never received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. He knows what he wants shot to shot, and gets it. Very few filmmakers work this way today, and no one outside of Alfred Hitchcock has ever done it better than De Palma.