PETERSON REVIEWS
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I’m on Spring Break. Posts will resume on April 20.
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‘Cover Girl’ Doesn’t Quite Know What to Do with Its Stars
There are a handful of moments in this hit 1944 musical where Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly remind you of their greatness, but they’re largely underserved by Charles Vidor’s static direction.
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The Cautious Optimism of ‘The Big City’
‘The Big City’ is blunt about the professional and personal difficulties that come with shifting tides.
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Overnight Successes and Falls from Grace in ‘Babylon’
‘Babylon’ intoxicatingly — if exaggeratedly and not always accurately — evokes the sugar-rush quality of silent moviemaking and the behind-the-scenes dramas surrounding them.
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The Best Movies of 2022
Looking back at a great year for cinema.
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‘Secret Defense’ is a Spellbinding Revenge Drama
Jacques Rivette takes a revenge plot and, subversively, is most interested in the mundane everyday details that would in most other movies be incidental.
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‘Outlaws’ is a Bad-Wig Crime Thriller
This Spanish drama has all the charge of a crime-doesn’t-pay TV movie.
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‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ is a Stunning Achievement — and a Bit of a Bore
James Cameron’s long-delayed follow-up to 2009’s ‘Avatar’ doubles down on visual spectacle and inert drama.
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‘À Nos Amours’ is One of the Great Coming-of-Age Movies
Where other directors might moralize or condescendingly diagnose, Maurice Pialat delicately and sensitively handles the emotional complications of a teenage girl’s budding sex life.
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Sally Field and Burt Reynolds Are Dynamite Together in ‘Smokey and the Bandit’
Jackie Gleason’s cigarette-voiced villain performance is a highlight, too.
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‘Hanna’ Should Have Stayed a Pitch
Joe Wright’s pivot to action filmmaking has flashes of intrigue but is mostly a slog.
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The Quiet Menace of ‘La Cérémonie’
Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert make for an unsettling pair in Claude Chabrol’s excellent psychological thriller.
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The Creeping Dread of ‘White Noise’ and ‘The Eternal Daughter’
Noah Baumbach tries his hand at adaptation, and Joanna Hogg expands her cinematic universe.
APRIL 2026
The Theme is ‘High Anxiety’
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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 