PETERSON REVIEWS
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I’m on Spring Break. Posts will resume on April 20.
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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.
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The Illicit Affairs of ‘Passages’ and ‘The Innocent’
New movies from Ira Sachs and Louis Garrel, reviewed.
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Snow White, Remixed, in ‘Ball of Fire’
In which Barbara Stanwyck stands in for the princess as a fast-talking lounge singer named Sugarpuss and seven stuffy professors do the dwarves.
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‘Fuego’ Lives Up to Its Title
Isabel Sarli has genuine star power.
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Sex with a Smile
On the two truest distillations of Mae West’s screen image.
APRIL 2026
The Theme is ‘High Anxiety’
ASDFJHGSD
The Unrelenting Grimness of ‘Frozen River’
Misty Upham and especially Melissa Leo are excellent in this frostbitten drama.
March 27, 2026
February 4, 2026
November 6, 2025
Superheroines
On Julia Loktev’s towering, terrifying ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow.’
March 30, 2026
Everything Everywhere
William Greaves’ ‘Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One’ is almost 60 years old and still feels ahead of the curve.
March 11, 2026
Next Big Things
Gregory La Cava’s ‘Stage Door’ is often at once hysterically funny and brutally pragmatic about the personal toll a career in entertainment can take.
March 4, 2026
Peterson Reviews 