"Blow Out" opened on July 24, 1981 to positive reviews from critics, including several that were ecstatic. In "The New Yorker", Pauline Kael gave the film one of her few unconditional raves: "De Palma has sprung to the place that Robert Altman achieved with films such as "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and "Nashville" and that Francis Ford Coppola reached with "The Godfather" films — that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we're moved by is an artist's vision...it's a great movie. Travolta and Allen are radiant performers." Roger Ebert's four-star review in the "Chicago Sun-Times" noted that "Blow Out" "is inhabited by a real cinematic intelligence. The audience isn't condescended to...we share the excitement of figuring out how things develop and unfold, when so often the movies only need us as passive witnesses." Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 84% based on 49 reviews, with an average grade of 7.6/10, with the critical consensus reading "With a story inspired by Antonioni's "Blow Up" and a style informed by the high-gloss suspense of Hitchcock, De Palma's "Blow Out" is raw, politically informed, and littered with film references".