PETERSON REVIEWS
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SYML is Just Getting Started
In a new profile, the Sammamish-based musician discusses his new album, working with Lana Del Rey, his relationship with the Northwest, and more.
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‘Harlan County USA’ Still Feels Urgent
Revisiting Barbara Kopple’s excellent documentary about unionization efforts in Southeast Kentucky in the summer of 1973.
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A Filmmaker’s Festival: The Gig Harbor Film Festival’s Executive Director on This Year’s Event
Pam Holt on what’s different for 2023, why it’s so hard for her to pick favorites, and a top-secret movie she can’t talk too much about.
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What’s Great About ‘Carmen Jones’ Cuts Through What Isn’t
Dorothy Dandridge is the best thing about a movie whose historical significance does not shield it from perpetuating the ills of 1950s Hollywood’s complicated relationship with Black actors.
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Charming Coming-of-Age Comedy ‘You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah’ Keeps It All in the Family
Plus: Cory Finley dips into science fiction with ‘Landscape with Invisible Hand.’
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Barbara Stanwyck Elevates ‘Stella Dallas’
Stanwyck has a way of making this treacly, broad-stroked motherly-sacrifice soap opera seem better than it is.
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A Love Triangle Among the Ruins in ‘A Foreign Affair’
Billy Wilder’s 1948 romantic comedy has much more than love on the brain.
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Anna May Wong is Hypnotic in ‘Piccadilly’
Celebrated as the first Chinese-American movie star, Wong gets a rare vehicle worthy of her time and talent with this 1929 romantic drama.
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Cobwebs: On ‘The Landlord’ and ‘Georgia, Georgia’
Two with Diana Sands.
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Lily Gladstone is the Best Thing About ‘The Unknown Country’
Though she can only do so much for this dramatically underbaked, formally fussy drama from Morrisa Maltz.
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Sex is Power: On ‘Baby Face’
The movie, all about a woman’s quest to fuck her way to the top, is notorious. But it isn’t overly reliant on shock value.
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The Startling Empathy of ‘The Accused’
Loretta Young is tremendous in an unexpectedly progressive movie about the nightmares of rape culture.
MARCH 2026
The Theme is ‘Acting’
ASDFJHGSD
‘Hollywood Shuffle’ Cuts Deep
The movie established director-actor-co-writer Robert Townsend not only as an astute critic but a limber comedy performer in the improv tradition.
February 4, 2025
November 6, 2025
October 27, 2025
Disobedience
John Sayles’ groundbreaking ‘Lianna’ was a landmark — albeit a criminally underseen one — for lesbian representation in cinema.
February 25, 2026
Trouble in Paradise
On the screwball-comedy perfection of 1937’s ‘The Awful Truth.’
February 23, 2026
The Heart of the Matter
Asghar Farhadi’s ‘A Separation’ more than sidesteps divorce-movie expectations.
February 16, 2026
Peterson Reviews 