"Brian De Palma's Sisters is the freshest, most gripping suspense thriller to hit movie screens since Night of the Living Dead [1968]. It is also the most insightful and deeply felt homage to the art of Alfred Hitchcock that a devoted admirer has yet produced...And to complete this almost perfect ode to Hitchcock there is, of course, the music score - by Bernard Herrmann. No small part of the film's success is due to it, for it is as brilliantly visceral and unsettling a composition as any he has composed for Hitchcock..."
- John McCarty, Cinefantastique

"Sisters, De Palma's finest achievement prior to Blow Out [1981] and one of the great American films of the 1970s...." - Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond

"Brian De Palma's low-budget horror movie...has its share of flaked-out humor...and De Palma does some virtuoso stunts though not in the dream-slapstick style of his later thrillers, Carrie [1976] and The Fury [1978]. This is a much more primitive scare picture. He lurches his way through; he can't seem to get two people talking to make a simple expository point without its sounding like the drabbest Republic picture of 1938. The facetious dialogue is a wet blanket, and De Palma isn't quite up to his apparent intention - to provide cheap thrills that are also a parody of old corn. He manages the thrills, though (there are some demented knife-slashings), and audiences seemed to be happily freaked by Bernard Herrmann's score, with its old radio-play throb and zing."
- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

"Brian De Palma's Sisters was made more or less consciously as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, but it has a life of its own and it's a neat little mystery picture...In a movie industry filled with young actresses who look great but can't act so well (especially when they've got to play intelligent characters), De Palma has cast two of the exceptions: Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt. Both of them are really fine, but Jennifer Salt is the bigger surprise because she's so convincing as the tough, stubborn, doggedly persistent outsider. It's a classic Hitchcock role. She's totally uninvolved and innocent, and in possession of information no one will believe." -
Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

"Sisters is a good psychological murder melodrama...Brian De Palma's direction emphasizes exploitation values which do not fully mask script weakness."
Variety Movie Guide

"Sisters, an artful homage to Hitchcock. It is a psychological suspense film, drawing upon Psycho but still raw with the background naturalism of student films. That has long since faded and been replaced with studied picture compilation."
David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

"Hailed as a homage to the art of Alfred Hitchcock and by one reviewer as a 'really radical feminist film,' Sisters actually seems less and less like either the more one sees of both Hitchcock and De Palma. Increasingly De Palma seems to be merely imitating Hitchcock or mechanically repeating his various devices...the use of split screen (a very unHitchcockian device) is both inventive and imaginative, and Kidder's hallucination sequence is genuinely disturbing and one of the most powerful things De Palma has ever done."
Phil Hardy, The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies

"A creepy, funny, visually innovative but not that satisfying suspense thriller by Brian De Palma...Film is a bit too violent, but if it has a major problem, it is that the opening sequence is so technically exciting (with tracking shots, split screen, sharp cutting), witty....and suspenseful that it's never equaled."
Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic.

"Although filled with wild inconsistencies and lurid excesses, this film is acted and directed with such style and verve that it hardly matters."
James O'Neill, Terror on Tape

"...it does indeed appear as a highly efficient gut-ripper, with far more suggestion than De Palma's later work of the loose-end flux of real life going on in the background. There is, however, much early evidence of his rampant misogyny, his increasingly blatant stealings from Hitchcock, and most unforgivable of all, his clear distaste for the people he creates. De Palma's father was a surgeon, which may explain such greedy sadism."
- Chris Peachment, TimeOut Film Guide

"...black comedy and biting satire, but confused by erratic editing, strange juxtaposing of scenes and lack of logic. Because De Palma's intentions are fuzzy, Sisters is an intriguing mess...True, the suspense is considerable and there is excellent use of split screen but it's ultimately a bumble or a jumble." - John Stanley, Creature Features

"Sisters joins Hollywood-caliber suspense sequences to the feel of a gritty exploitation film and themes in tune with the time of its creation. That it opens with one of De Palma's trademark fakeouts - in this case Peeping Toms, a game show that recalls Candid Camera by way of Michael Powell - reveals both its importance in terms of the director's later work and how much the initial enjoyment of it depends on an ignorance of its many plot twists and ingenious dashing of expectations...De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best." -
Keith Phipps, The Onion AV Club

"...arguably De Palma's best, most entertaining film. It contains enough inspired wickedness and lunacy that it would have made even Hitchcock jealous. But for all its prankishness, the film remains a telling exploration of duality, identity, and obsession--themes that De Palma would recycle time and again, but rarely with such wit or intelligence." - Derek Hill, Images Journal


"Sisters is one of De Palma's best films, better than any of his subsequent horror thrillers. It's so good, in fact, that later attempts like Dressed to Kill (1980) and Body Double (1984), lacking both the novelty and the inspiration of Sisters, come off as derivative and devoid of imagination, as if De Palma had become some kind of cinema Sisyphus, doomed forever to repeat the same meaningless homages...De Palma has several clever sequences that seem wholly his own, for instance, the Life Magazine newsreel story on the twins that provides very effective exposition. But Sisters is best remembered for two killer scenes, the asylum nightmare and the split screen murder." - Glenn Erickson, Video Savant

"Some film fans may tend to discredit De Palma for drawing as much from Hitchcock as he has during his hit-and-miss career, but we are glad he has been a proponent of the split-screen, a technically challenging component of cinema that almost died with Gance before its resurrection in the 1960s and total exploitation by De Palma a few years later. And one of the best places to see De Palma's technical genius is in his 1973 Sisters....Sisters, with its blend of classic suspense, '70s horror, and a relentless focus on mutants and freaks of nature, is a film designed to make you very, very uncomfortable, despite the everyday nature of the lead actors. Kidder, who may be laying on that French Canadian accent a bit thick, nonetheless makes for a credible lead with her airy, superficial quality, and Salt is relentless as the no-nonsense muckraker."
JJB, The DVD Journal

Compiled by Jeff Stafford