Reception
In June 1965, critic Howard Thompson of The New York Times called Brainstorm "a so-so package of suspense ... Up to a point the story cuts ice. Then it slips into absurdity." Judith Crist called the film "a sub-B potboiler for those who find comic books too intellectual"; Leslie Halliwell called it an "overlong thriller which starts off agreeably in the Double Indemnity vein, but goes slow and solemn around the half way mark."
Some critics held the film in higher regard with the passage of time. The editors of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (1979) described Brainstorm as "a minor masterpiece of the 1960s":
- Along with films like Psycho, Brainstorm is one of the best examples of the 1960s counterpart of 1940s film noir. At the core of the film's quality is a complex, compelling plot. Like Nightmare Alley and Double Indemnity, which in a narrative sense it closely resembles, Brainstorm follows a typical noir pattern from romance, to melodrama, to crime, and finally to horror. But unlike these films, which deal only tangentially with insanity, Brainstorm is primarily an exploration of that theme.
"Brainstorm is undoubtedly the last of the truly great black-and-white films noirs," wrote Nicholas Christopher in his book, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (1997):
- It is unquestionably the most nihilistic film noir of either the classic or present-day cycle. ... Brainstorm is a film conceived and shot in the year following the Kennedy assassination, and its insistent references to madness, murder, mayhem, and conspiracy reflect the tenor of those times. ... is the final, essential entry in that long line of films noirs that begins at the end of the Second World War.
Reviewing Christopher's Somewhere in the Night, Michael Atkinson of The Village Voice wrote that "the book does evoke a few forgotten beauts, notably William Conrad's 1965 schizonoir Brainstorm. For Christopher, this truly nutty film 'is to other film noirs what Lobachevski's geometry — in which parallel lines eventually intersect — is to Euclid's,' and insofar as noir seems to reflect back what the viewer brings to it, he's not far off target."
For the 2002 Sight & Sound poll of the top ten films of all time, critic Jack Stevenson included Brainstorm in his list.
Read more about this topic: Brainstorm (1965 Film)
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