PETERSON REVIEWS
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‘Brute Force’ is Best At Its Weariest
Which is to say when disgust at the prison-industrial complex is at its barest.
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‘Slums of Beverly Hills’: Family Values
The ensemble pushing it all forward is uniformly excellent, although Lyonne is so exceptional — she turns feigning bewilderment into an art form — that she predominantly is the person who makes the movie worth pursuing.
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The Indelible Paranoia of ‘The Parallax View’
The storyline is so rife with close calls and contrived developments that I ultimately enjoyed ‘The Parallax View’ not as I would, say, ‘All the President’s Men,’ which was as mistrustful as it was plausible-feeling. It’s more like fretful, intelligently designed pulp fiction.
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‘The Kids Are All Right’: Or Maybe Not
Cholodenko has made ‘The Kids Are All Right’ not in the key of an American tragedy but rather in the spirit of a semi-lightweight slice-of-life dramedy.
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‘Being Julia’ is Nothing Without Annette Bening
‘Being Julia’ is a flat imitation of a Hollywood Golden Era melodrama.
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You Can’t Look Away from ‘Color of Night’
I like to think of ‘Color of Night’ not as a mere failure but more a kind of transcendent moment where every one of the erotic thriller’s most tiresome tropes coalesced and then started the process of stupefying genre self-cannibalization.
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‘Cherry Falls’ is a Solid Teen Slasher Movie
‘Cherry Falls’ felt kind of like a balm when I saw it.
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‘The Lodger’ is Feature-Length Foreshadowing
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 movie thrillingly offers ideas and themes that would later be more deeply explored at their most fetal.
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Everyone is on Their A-Game in ‘Some Like It Hot’
The movie, aside from 1953’s ‘Niagara,’ is also the one, I think, which best showcases Monroe’s preternatural relationship with the camera.
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Presumed Guilty
On ‘Suspect,’ ‘Reversal of Fortune,’ and ‘Guilty as Sin.’
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‘The American President’: An Appetizer for ‘The West Wing’
It’s a broad-stroked, entertaining admixture of love and politics.
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In a Lonely Place
On ‘Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool’ and ‘The Report.’
SEPTEMBER 2026
The Theme is ‘Based on an Article’
ASDFJHGSD
‘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 