PETERSON REVIEWS
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Overnight Success
‘The Barefoot Contessa’ is among the most pessimistic dramas about film stardom ever made.
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Upheavals
On ‘House of Gucci’ and ‘Belfast.’
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Worms
On ‘Last Night in Soho’ and ‘Dune.’
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‘Dance with the Devil’ Does Too Much
‘Dance with the Devil’ is a busy movie; its narrative poses so many potential problems for the characters they could practically form a line.
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Retrospections
On ‘The French Dispatch,’ ‘The Velvet Underground,’ and ‘The Last Duel.’
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‘Pulse’ Makes Us Take a Silly Premise Seriously
It’s a nightmare-as-movie, where not much makes sense but where the environment in which everything takes place is so creepily immersive, feels true enough, that even when things get a hair tedious you still haven’t gotten rid of the pit that has formed in your gut.
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Sex and Death, Locked in a Tango, in ‘Def by Temptation’
In this atmospheric and sensual (but not humorless) horror movie, Bible-style capital-T temptation is embodied by a blood-thirsty, ostensibly eons-old succubus that disguises itself as a distractingly beautiful woman.
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Bad Ideas
On ‘Halloween Kills’ and ‘Lamb.’
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‘Countess Dracula’ Doesn’t Deserve Ingrid Pitt
‘Countess Dracula’’s wall-to-wall wasted potential is almost as suffocating as the castle in which its bloodthirsty noblewoman commits her imaginatively heinous crimes.
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Men on Missions
On ‘No Time to Die’ and ‘The Guilty’
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‘The Cell’ Gives New Meaning to the Psychological Thriller
‘The Reflecting Skin’ has two ways of seeing.
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‘The House That Dripped Blood’ is a Solid Horror-Omnibus Movie
Even if ‘The House That Dripped Blood’ isn’t particularly scary in real time, the places its stories go manage to still linger in our memory a bit — an effect all good horror should have.
MARCH 2026
The Theme is ‘Acting’
ASDFJHGSD
‘Notting Hill’: A Star-Crossed Romance
Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant do wonders to soften — but not completely distract from — the contrivances of Roger Michell’s romantic comedy.
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 