PETERSON REVIEWS
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‘Commando’ is a Fun Star Vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger
This is paint-by-numbers action at its best: it knows what its viewers expect of it and delivers.
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‘Personal Best’ Takes the Sports Movie to New Heights
‘Personal Best’ accomplishes many things and well, but among the most impressive of its achievements is that is also functions, almost off-handedly, as a paean to the undersung and the could-have-beens.
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The Unpredictable Menace of ‘The Prowler’
‘The Prowler’ is a red herring of a title until it isn’t anymore.
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Purgatories
‘Predator’ and ‘The Last Action Hero,’ reviewed.
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‘A Chinese Ghost Story’ Feels Like It Could Be Recounted Over a Campfire
Just like how even told-to-death, campfire-baiting ghost stories never truly get old if told the right way, movies like ‘A Chinese Ghost Story’ don’t either.
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‘Trouble in Mind’ is Cold to the Touch
‘Trouble in Mind’ is in a state of used to be.
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‘Logan’s Run’ is an Intriguing Dystopian Thriller
The seriousness of the world-building and concepts is at odds with the look of the movie.
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‘Conan the Barbarian’: The Movie That Made Arnold Schwarzenegger a Star
This is a project manifestly as interested in thrill-giving as it is in milieu-building.
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‘Boom!’: Better Than Its Rep
It’s an anomaly in the bad-movie canon in that many of its detractors recognize that it’s a special kind of bad.
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‘The Witch Who Came from the Sea’ and ‘Demon Seed,’ Reviewed
On Matt Cimber’s misunderstood study of trauma and Donald Cammell’s fairly prescient horror thriller.
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On ‘The Hidden’
‘The Hidden’ is a standard-enough cop thriller though more so feels like the kind of old-fashioned chase movie American International Pictures used to make, just with a sci-fi edge.
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Lesson in Survival
Five films by Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li.
OCTOBER 2026
The Theme is ‘Thrills and Chills’
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Sin and Vice
On ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh,’ ‘Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key,’ and ‘All the Colors of the Dark,’ an informal trilogy from Sergio Martino starring Edwige Fenech.
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
