For Brian De Palma, plots have never been more than machines for generating imagery; here the director (who also wrote the script) finds one of his most productive machines yet. The film opens with a simple jewel heist that De Palma expands into a numbing tour de force of cross-cutting, camera movement, and visual fetishism; it's scored with a Boléro parody by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Once this showoff sequence is out of the way, De Palma proceeds to draw filigrees around the consequences of the heist, evincing a visual sophistication that's often pleasurable and absorbing.

What's hardest to accept isn't De Palma's contempt for verisimilitude (actually that's the film's most appealing quality) but his failure to enliven the boring misogynist trope of the "femme fatale," which in his hands (and in Rebecca Romijn-Stamos's static performance) yields a lubricious cartoon. In its narrative audacity and its motif of interchangeable women, Femme Fatale recalls Mulholland Drive, but whereas David Lynch's film conveys the excitement of an artist working deep within his material, De Palma's serves up merely a frozen and stylized mastery for the delectation of connoisseurs. (110 minutes) At the Providence Place 16 and Showcase cinemas.