And agreed with Steve, it's a bit late for him to be maturing in his 60s. I didn't day I wouldn't be seeing it, I like Seigner as an actress and I still approach his movies with an attempt at an open mind.

I have been a fan of virtually everything he has made, of course the last half from a die hard fan's view. I really enjoyed his NON HO SONNO very much, though he pretty much drew from several of his earlier gialli for it's influences...still very entertaining!

I'd hardly call this a weak role for Nicolodi in comparison to her barely cropping up in stuff like INFERNO (1980) (my favorite Argento film, for the record).

Okay, this was read one way and taken another. I should have said that Argento's FILMS are maturing as the years go on, in the sense that he's not as experimental as he once was. He's gone to a more basic approach than in films passed.

Well, for me at least, there's a very distinct drop in quality from TENEBRAE to PHENOMENA. It's not that PHENOMENA is a total waste of time - it isn't. I greatly admire the atmospheric and sinister opening sequence with Fiore Argento, the amazingly eerie theme called "The Valley", the look of the film, the performances of Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasence, and the amazingly over the top climax. But the film as a whole is extremely uneven and frequently embarrassing. The scenes with the girls at the school are particularly awful (the girl with the Bee Gees T-shirt and the talk about Richard Gere makes me cringe) and I can barely watch Jennifer's "I love you all" speech to the insects. The heavy metal music is obtrusive and BAD, and I hated the chimp. The big problem for me is that the Jennifer character is a weird outsider that is frequently hard to identify with, and Argento would sadly continue to emply such main characters in many of his subsequent films.

As for OPERA, I'm not very keen on it at all. Like PHENOMENA, it has some outstanding isolated sequences that make lasting impact but as a whole it doesn't work for me. It seems to continue all the bad traditions from PHENOMENA, such as the use of bad heavy metal to ruin the atmosphere, smart ravens (similar to the flies from PHENOMENA), and a main character who is an outsider with whom it is very hard to empathize. The latter is not made any better by the fact that Cristina Marsillach is a thoroughly bland and hopeless actress. The acting on the whole is risible (save for Ian Charleson and Daria Nicolodi). Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni is is particularly embarrassing as she doesn't seem to realize that extreme over-acting only really works if you're playing the villain. There's also the matter of the horrible ending.
Yeah, I'm being harsh, and I know it. I do think that the film looks amazing, has some good scenes of suspense and a couple of great set-pieces (the keyhole scene is superb) but it's seriously bogged down by the other things I mentioned.

It hardly comes as a surprise, then, that I consider Argento's finest films to be the ones he made when he was together with Daria Nicolodi. I love the creative influence she had on him and I think her influence on Argento's work is often underrated. Unfortunately, after their split Argento started using Franco Ferrini as his collaborator, and Ferrini isn't a particularly good writer IMO - hence the significant drop in quality from TENEBRAE to PHENOMENA. Indeed, a lot of the problems with Argento's more recent films lie with the screenplays so he really needs to find better writers to work with. I wonder why he doesn't do a project with Ernesto Gastaldi as that could really be cool.

I'm not dismissing his later work, however! Sure, I hate TRAUMA and I'm not a big fan of THE STENDHAL SYNDROME but I find PHANTOM OF THE OPERA to be very enjoyable and I also like SLEEPLESS and THE CARD PLAYER a great deal, although my feelings for them have changed since I first saw them. I don't think as highly of SLEEPLESS now as I did upon my first viewing, whereas with THE CARD PLAYER it's the opposite as I've grown to like the film more and more. DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK? was an enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half but it I find it undistinguished and forgettable. As for THE THIRD MOTHER... well, I must admit that I haven't been able to bring myself to see it yet. I will for sure but the right occasion hasn't come yet...

I agree with Johan in that Argento was at the peak of his career during his collaborations with Daria Nicolodi, and I do enjoy the animal trilogy of gialli, partly because of the epoch in which they were made, and because they show a growing promise that was to come to fruition in Deep Red.

Also I dislike this need to have heavy metal thumping as part of the scores for these films which seems to be rather crass. I am not talking about Goblin here, for the most part their scores mostly compliment what's going on on screen, or just add to the outlandish nature of the films, assaulting eyes and ears. I make no secret of my dislike for metal, I don't enjoy to listen to it for pleasure at home, any more so than I would rap or dance music, but for some reason horror and metal seem to be bound up together. I admit to enjoying trashy scores with guilty pleasure songs, such as those in Fulci's The Psychic or In House on the Edge of the Park, and there are some very atmospheric scores out there, the likes of Ortolani, Frizzi spring to mind.

Or maybe I'm just getting old