--- title: "The Black Dahlia" year: 2006 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/the-black-dahlia" fi1m_score: 56 critics_score: 49 critics_reviews: 13 published: "2026-09-20T10:27:48.300023+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T10:27:48.827888+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # The Black Dahlia (2006) Directed by Brian De Palma · 2h 01m · MPA R · Crime, Thriller, Drama **Fi1m score: 56** · Critics 49 from 13 reviews *In a sentence:* A murder mystery in which the corpse gives the liveliest performance > Brian De Palma shoots 1947 Los Angeles as well as anyone has, and gives Mia Kirshner two minutes of screen-test footage that haunt the rest of the film. Around them, Josh Hartnett sleepwalks through a plot nobody has finished untangling. ## Synopsis Los Angeles, 1947. Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), two LAPD officers who used to box, fight an exhibition bout to help pass a police bond issue and come out of it as partners in the Warrants squad. Lee lives with Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), who has a past she does not discuss, and Bucky spends most of his evenings on their sofa. During a stakeout that goes wrong, the body of Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), a would-be actress, is found cut in half in a vacant lot, and the papers name her the Black Dahlia. Lee talks his way onto the case and stops sleeping. Bucky follows a lead to a nightclub and to Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank), the daughter of a rich family in the hills, who looks a good deal like the dead girl. ## Review Brian De Palma has spent most of his career circling a picture like this, and James Ellroy’s novel ought to have been the one that let him make it. Los Angeles, 1947. A young woman’s body in two halves in a vacant lot. Two policemen who used to be boxers, a woman between them, and a rich family in the hills with a daughter who looks like the corpse. Josh Friedman’s screenplay keeps all of it and finds nothing to hold it together, so that by the final half hour we could not have told you which strand we were meant to be following. It is a handsome film with one great scene in it, and the rest is a muddle. The reviews so far mostly say as much, and on this occasion so do we. The great scene belongs to Mia Kirshner. Elizabeth Short is seen almost entirely in black-and-white screen-test footage, sitting on a stool while a director off camera asks her about herself. She lies, flirts, tries an accent, quotes something she has learned, and once, for about a second, stops performing and looks lost. We found this upsetting in a way nothing else here manages, because the film is making us watch a real murdered woman audition for our attention and it knows exactly what it is doing. The rest of the picture puts her in a lot and treats her as a clue. Vilmos Zsigmond shoots everything else in browns and tobacco yellows, as if the print had been kept in a smoker’s drawer, and the one shot people will remember is his. The camera lifts from a shootout on one street, over a rooftop, and comes down on the other side to find the body before any of the police do. Dante Ferretti’s Los Angeles is all stucco and hollow signage, a city built to be photographed from the front, and Jenny Beavan dresses Hilary Swank in black and Scarlett Johansson in cream so that we always know which woman is meant to be trouble. Mark Isham’s score does a competent impression of the period without adding anything to it. The trouble is in the middle of the frame. Hartnett narrates the film, and he reads Bucky’s voice-over as though it were a shopping list; when he is on screen he watches events with the mild interest of a man waiting for a bus. Ellroy’s Bucky is a coward and a liar who knows it. Hartnett plays him as tired. Johansson looks right, lit from behind in a doorway with a cigarette, and then she speaks, and the lines come out flat and modern, a woman at a wedding reading a poem she was handed that morning. A triangle needs three sides. This one has a corner. Aaron Eckhart is better. Lee’s obsession with the case makes him twitchy and rude, and Eckhart lets him fray in front of us without asking to be liked. Swank plays Madeleine as if she has wandered in from a funnier film, all slow vowels and appraising looks, and the picture improves whenever she is in it. Fiona Shaw, as her mother, plays at a pitch the rest of the cast has not been told about, and we laughed, uncertain whether we were meant to. Mike Starr, as the senior detective Russ Millard, is the only person who behaves as though the murder were a job. De Palma’s best thrillers, *Dressed to Kill* and *Carlito’s Way* among them, had one idea and followed it to the end. This has a dozen, and Bill Pankow is asked to cut between the boxing, the triangle, the Linscotts and the dead girl as though they were all the same story, which they are not. At 121 minutes it is not long, but it feels padded and rushed at once, and the late stretch piles reveal on reveal with a speed that turns a mystery into a briefing. By then we had stopped following and started counting, which is no state for a thriller to leave you in. Watch it for Kirshner and for the crane shot, and do not expect to explain the plot to whoever falls asleep beside you. The 15 certificate covers a fair amount of blood, most of it in shadow. It is De Palma’s best-looking film in years and one of his least coherent, and we would rather have had the coherence. *Fi1m score 56, published 20 September 2026.* ## What the critics say The reviews lean negative: more than half the critics find the film wanting and only a handful defend it. What praise there is goes to De Palma’s craft, chiefly the visual set pieces and the mounting of post-war Los Angeles. One sequence, the screen-test footage of the murdered woman, is singled out by several critics as the point where the film’s ideas about voyeurism and self-delusion come into focus. Hilary Swank draws steady approval, and Mia Kirshner’s brief turn as Betty Short is noted more than once. The complaints cluster on the plot, which most critics find overloaded and hard to follow, and on the running time. Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson divide opinion sharply: Variety and The New York Times find them close to disastrous, while The AV Club calls them naturals. The spread is wide, with The AV Club near the top of the scale, the Evening Standard placing it in the class of LA Confidential, and a bloc of American papers near the bottom. ### Reviews we read (13) - **The AV Club**, Nathan Rabin (A-): Praises De Palma’s restrained yet obsessive noir adaptation of Ellroy, with Hartnett and Johansson as naturals in the hardboiled world; singles out the haunting audition/voyeurism sequences as a highlight of the film’s themes. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/the-black-dahlia-1798202031) - **Slant Magazine** (75/100, inferred): De Palma eschews straightforward adaptation for a formally complex, tragic take that foregrounds political consciousness and loss; singles out the expressionistic camerawork and the way it visualizes the protagonist’s grief and the society’s corruption. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-black-dahlia/) - **Evening Standard** (****): This is De Palma back to something like his best: a superbly shot, virtuoso thriller that may not quite match LA Confidential but is in the same class, with strong performances and stylish direction. It notes some melodramatic tendencies and weird moments but calls it one of the best American thrillers for some time. [Read](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/film/scarlett-womens-dark-secrets-7388186.html) - **Empire**, Adam Smith (50/100, inferred): The critic praises De Palma's technical bravura, lush atmosphere, and strong casting, particularly Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson, while noting the film's gripping noir style and visual wizardry. However, it faults the director's familiar emotional coldness and lack of interest in characters' humanity, making the denouement feel frigid. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/black-dahlia-review/) - **Screen Daily**, Lee Marshall (50/100, inferred): De Palma delivers a stylish genre exercise that nails the atmosphere of post-war Los Angeles but falls short of the cohesion seen in LA Confidential. The review highlights the solid cast and classic De Palma themes while noting the cluttered storyline. [Read](https://www.screendaily.com/the-black-dahlia/4028437.article) - **The Guardian**, Peter Bradshaw (2/5): The critic finds this over-long and muddled adaptation of Ellroy's novel unsatisfying despite its handsome mounting and directorial gusto. The plot leads nowhere satisfying and features some over-the-top melodramatic performances. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/sep/15/thriller.scarlettjohansson) - **Time Out**, Ben Walters (40/100, inferred): The adaptation struggles to capture the novel's depths, with De Palma's cinematic indulgences overwhelming the story of obsession and corruption. The critic praises the screen-test footage sequence for exposing the film's themes of self-delusion. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/the-black-dahlia) - **Los Angeles Times**, Carina Chocano (30/100, inferred): The film feels like a bait and dump, overloaded with noir conventions, overripe period detail, and an overly complicated, hard-to-follow plot that buries the central mystery. The brief glimpses of the Dahlia herself and some campy, over-the-top scenes (notably with Fiona Shaw) provide the main points of interest amid the excess. [Read](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-sep-15-et-black15-story.html) - **The New Yorker**, David Denby (30/100, inferred): The film is overrich and fundamentally unsatisfying due to rampant allusiveness, an awkward and overly complicated narrative, and undigested plot elements that lead to irritation rather than satisfaction. De Palma's visual brilliance in certain scenes, such as bodies falling in slow motion, is praised, along with Mia Kirshner's effective turn as Betty Short. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/09/18/inescapable-pasts) - **The New York Times**, Manohla Dargis (30/100, inferred): The critic finds the film restrained and awkward despite De Palma's potential for creative lunacy, with the leads (except Hilary Swank) disastrous and the grim reality of the real murder weighing heavily. Swank's slinky, convincing performance as Madeleine Linscott is singled out for praise amid the film's lack of playful cinematic energy. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/movies/15dahl.html) - **Variety**, Todd McCarthy (30/100, inferred): A ripping yarn undercut by lackluster performances (especially Hartnett and Johansson) and overripe late melodrama, though De Palma delivers fine visual set pieces and atmosphere. Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank stand out among the cast for strong impressions in a film that generates intrigue but falls short of classic noir like Chinatown. [Read](https://variety.com/2006/film/awards/the-black-dahlia-1200513882/) - **Eye for Film**, Chris (55/100, inferred): The film is an intensely visual experience that prioritizes De Palma's stylistic auteurship and filmmaking aesthetic over narrative substance, which may annoy average viewers. The intriguing crime story is presented through a deliberately muted, dreamlike lens that suppresses reality. [Read](https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/the-black-dahlia-film-review-by-chris) - **The Skinny**, Steve Adams (★★): The critic credits De Palma for attempting a noir adaptation that other directors avoided but faults the result as overly convoluted 'noir-lite' focused on a romantic triangle rather than the crime itself. The film is called smug, too long by half an hour, and ultimately alienating to viewers. [Read](https://www.theskinny.co.uk/film/new-releases/the-black-dahlia) ## Details - **Director:** Brian De Palma - **Director:** Brian De Palma - **Screenplay:** Josh Friedman - **Novel:** James Ellroy - **Cinematography:** Vilmos Zsigmond - **Editor:** Bill Pankow - **Music:** Mark Isham - **Production design:** Dante Ferretti - **Costume design:** Jenny Beavan - **Producer:** Avi Lerner, Rudy Cohen, Moshe Diamant - **Cast:** Josh Hartnett as Bucky Bleichert; Scarlett Johansson as Kay Lake; Aaron Eckhart as Lee Blanchard; Hilary Swank as Madeleine Linscott; Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short; Mike Starr as Russ Millard; Fiona Shaw as Ramona Linscott; Patrick Fischler as Ellis Loew - **Runtime:** 2h 01m - **Certificate (MPA):** R - **Release (the US):** 15 September 2006 - **Genres:** Crime, Thriller, Drama - **Budget:** $50 million - **Box office:** $49 million ## Where to watch in the US - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $14.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-20.* Also available in: BR, CA, CL, CO, ES, IN, IT, JP, MX, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 2007: Best Cinematography (nominated) ## If you liked this - *L.A. Confidential* (1997), Fi1m 88: The other Ellroy adaptation, and the one that keeps its plot in its hands — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/l-a-confidential.md) - *Chinatown* (1974), Fi1m 93: Los Angeles, a rich family and a secret; the model this film is measured against — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/chinatown.md) - *Memories of Murder* (2003), Fi1m 91: Korean detectives worn down by a real unsolved case; funnier and far sadder — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/memories-of-murder.md) - *Mulholland Drive* (2001), Fi1m 92: Another dead-girl Hollywood dream, with an audition scene to stand beside Kirshner’s — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/mulholland-drive.md) - *Blow Out* (1981), Fi1m 88: De Palma at full stretch, with one idea and the nerve to follow it — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/blow-out.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/the-black-dahlia