Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Brian De Palma should never be left to his own devices. Working alongside a creative support team, the talented director still manages to borrow from every manual in the book, yet his films are usually entertaining. Left to himself, as he is here, the results become a torpid series of sticky hijinks--a grab-bag of ideas taken not just from De Palma's heroes, but blatant steals from his own pictures! John Lithgow has been preconditioned to give a bravura actor's turn as a child psychologist whose personality has been 'split' by his nefarious mad-doctor father; when Lithgow spies his unsatisfied wife having an affair with a former flame, he goes off the deep end, resulting in a series of incoherent violent attacks aided by a trouble-making twin brother who doesn't really exist. Cinematographer Stephen H. Burum does some interesting things with his camera, and yet the art direction lets him down (the colors congeal and the film ends up looking chintzy, a problem Burum had earlier on "Body Double", also a De Palma film). Lithgow cackles, acts the hipster, dresses in drag, the works. However, all these fancy tricks--and De Palma's silly scare theatrics--cannot save the picture from doing a fast fade. *1/2 from ****

Just one year before his big critical and commercial comeback with "Carlito's Way", Brian De Palma wrote and directed this cute little black comedy about mother-killing and child-kidnapping! It's one of his few misfires: the script is weak, sometimes muddled (there are a few too many dream sequences) and at other times explaining at length things that the audience has already understood. There are parts of this film that are actually boring, which is usually the last thing De Palma's films can be accused of. But it's not a total write-off: John Lithgow has a field day playing multiple roles, there are some De Palma visual flourishes, and the opening sequence - especially the "sneezing" part - is absolutely hilarious and unforgettable! ** out of 4.

After the critical and commercial public flogging he received for his bastardisation of Tom Wolfe's fascinating, multi-layered and often hilarious novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Brian De Palma turned back to the genre that had served him well early on his career, the psychological thriller. With crime 'biopic' The Untouchables (1987) and the hit-and-miss war drama Casualties of War (1989), De Palma has seemingly turned his back on the world of Hitchockian suspense, but his career was in serious danger. The result was Raising Cain, a movie so utterly ludicrous and ham-fisted that it's a wonder how he is still making movies. Yet, there's something perversely irresistible about the film.Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow) is a respected psychologist suffering from multiple personality disorder, who, at the beginning of the movie, chloroforms a young mother and steals her child while being egged on by one of his cockier alter-egos, Cain. His wife Jenny (90's mainstay Lolita Davidovich) is concerned that Carter is spending too much time obsessing over their daughter, who he seems to view more of a subject of study than his own flesh and blood. Jenny rekindles a romance with a former flame, Jack (Steven Bauer), and the two are spotted by Carter making love in the woods. As Carter struggles to keep his many personalities in check, Jenny struggles to separate her dreams from reality.While watching the movie, I kept wondering if this was truly the same De Palma who forged such well-constructed thrillers as Sisters (1973), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981); films that often carefully towed the line of B-movie daftness yet managed to stay grounded. Is Raising Cain a bad movie? Yes, probably. But with the casting of De Palma's favourite ham John Lithgow and its sickly, TV movie aesthetic, there's something oddly fascinating about its silliness. It attempts to confuse its already convoluted plot even further by staging scenes within dreams within memories within more dreams. While this is certainly frustrating, I was still rooted to my seat, desperate to see how this nonsense plays out. His films are often divisive, but Raising Cain had even the most hardcore De Palma fans questioning their loyalty. Personally, my love far outweighed the hate.

Jenny Nix (Lolita Davidovich), wife of eminent child psychologist Carter Nix (John Lithgow), becomes increasingly concerned about her husband's seemingly obsessive concern over the upbringing of their daughter (Amanda Pombo).This is not De Palma's strongest film and is more than a little strange and far-fetched. We do have just a bit of voyeurism, which seems necessary to make this part of the De Palma oeuvre. But seriously, this whole film is like a 90-minute audition tape for John Lithgow, showing off his range of characters and emotions.Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly summed it up nicely when he wrote, "Is Raising Cain a good movie? No way. You could almost say it's intentionally bad — a gleeful piece of jerry-built schlock. Yet De Palma's naughty-boy gamesmanship has a perverse fascination, even when it doesn't work (which is most of the time)."