PETERSON REVIEWS
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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.
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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.
SEPTEMBER 2026
The Theme is ‘Based on an Article’
ASDFJHGSD
In ‘Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros,’ It’s All in the Process
Revisiting Frederick Wiseman’s 44th documentary, which trains its gaze on the Troisgros family and its various culinary pursuits.
August 19, 2026
May 25, 2026
May 13. 2026
Strong, Stoic Types
Director-star Paul Newman’s 1971 treatment of Ken Kesey’s ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’ perceptively observes the corrosiveness of toxic masculinity.
August 7, 2026
Working Girls
‘Broken Mirrors,’ Marleen Gorris’ 1984 follow-up to her still-transcendent feminist drama ‘A Question of Silence,’ expands on its predecessor’s themes while dramatically improving on its writer-director’s aesthetic command.
July 9, 2026
Found Connections
Donna Deitch’s ‘Desert Hearts’ was a breakthrough for lesbian representation in cinema. It also achieves another rarified thing: Characters who feel like they exist outside a screenplay’s bounds.
June 30, 2026
Peterson Reviews 