Blow Out

Directed by Brian De Palma

Starring John Lithgow, Dennis Franz, Nancy Allen, John Travolta

While recording sound effects for a slasher flick, Jack Terri (John Travolta) stumbles upon a real-life horror: a car careening off a bridge and into a river. Jack jumps into the water and fishes out Sally (Nancy Allen) from the car, but the other passenger is already dead -- a governor intending to run for president. As Jack does some investigating of his tapes, and starts a perilous romance with Sally, he enters a tangled web of conspiracy that might leave him dead...

"... classic De Palma, with its sinister elegance, meticulous cinematic choreography, voyeuristic obsessions, and fascination with guilt, as well as his most human and mortally vulnerable film." Sean Axmaker

"Blow Out begins with a joke; by the end, the joke has been turned inside out. In a way, the movie is about accomplishing the one task set for the sound-effects man at the start: he has found a better scream. It’s a great movie." Pauline Kael

"The final moments of Blow Out are among the most shocking and powerful of De Palma's oeuvre, tacking a final note of irony onto a story that is in every other way a straightforward denunciation of power run amok.... " James Kendrick