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.’
OCTOBER 2026
The Theme is ‘Thrills and Chills’
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The Surprising Sensitivity of ‘The Leopard Man’
This proto-slasher from 1943 takes pains to show that its victims are more than their fates.
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
