Thriller maven John Farris adapted his own novel, but De Palma made it his typically woolly own, as Kirk Douglas tries to foil the recruitment of telekinetic teens Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens (the latter his son) by government agent and ex-colleague John Cassavetes. A longtime De Palma booster, Kael enthused that the mayhem “[is] so much worse than you feared that you have to laugh,” and was particularly delighted by the graphic finale and by the John Williams score.