PETERSON REVIEWS
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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.
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‘The Reincarnation of Peter Proud’ Doesn’t Go Where You Think It Will
The finale is so wonderfully ghoulish — it almost makes the story feel like an old moral tale — that I’m sure Peter Proud might wish he’d woken up prematurely yet again instead of getting what he thought he wanted.
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She’s Not There
On ‘Titane’ and ‘The Mad Women’s Ball.’
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In the House
‘Tenebrae’ is about as personal as a slasher movie can get.
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‘Museo’ Smartly Rejiggers the Heist Movie
The film tries to stay planted in real life; it’s grounded by its convincingly co-dependent lead performances and Ruizpalacios’s measured and thoughtful approach to what is outwardly a too-wild-to-be-true curiosity of a story.
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Smoke Screens
On ‘The Nowhere Inn’ and ‘Prisoners of the Ghostland.’
SEPTEMBER 2026
The Theme is ‘Based on an Article’
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‘Bigger Than Life”s Resounding Anger
By the film’s end, which offers no resounding resolution, you feel practically pummeled by its driving dilemma.
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 