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PETER KEOUGH

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Review: My Perestroika

Transitioning to capitalism
Socialism might be a dirty word in America, but for Russians during the Soviet era, it was the way things were.

By: PETER KEOUGH | April 07, 2011

Review: Potiche

Screwball comedy meets political boilerplate
The eclectic François Ozon often combines the offbeat and the generic to the benefit of both.

By: PETER KEOUGH | April 07, 2011

Review: Winter In Wartime

Coming-of-age thriller
Evoking a similar scene in John Boorman's wonderful World War II memoir, Hope and Glory , a stricken British bomber crashes just outside a small Dutch town.

By: PETER KEOUGH | April 07, 2011

Review: Hanna

Relentless tween assassin
For some reason, teenage and pre-teen girls have become the new action hero.

By: PETER KEOUGH | April 10, 2011

Duncan Jones on solving Source Code

Game plan
It's the elephant in the room when you're talking to Duncan Jones: this guy is Zowie Bowie, Ziggy Stardust's son. It's uncool to bring it up, but how can you not at least mention it?

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 31, 2011

Precious rather than profound, sententious rather than wise
With films like Taste of Cherry, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has matched primal themes with self-conscious, self-reflective artifice to make some of the greatest movies of recent years.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 31, 2011

Review: Insidious

Campy haunted-house knockoff
When young Dalton (Ty Simpkins) mysteriously falls into a coma, a doctor tells his parents Renai (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Patrick Wilson) that he's "never seen anything like it."

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 31, 2011

Review: Source Code

Stranger on a train
At the risk of spoilers, let me just say that in his second film, Duncan Jones repeats horizontally what he accomplished vertically in his terrific 2009 debut, Moon . Or maybe vice versa.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 31, 2011

Review: Win Win

FIlm critic Peter Keough gives Win Win three stars.
Back in the '30s, with directors like Frank Capra and John Ford, Hollywood showed great sympathy for the forgotten men and women laid low by the economy.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 25, 2011

Thomas McCarthy's game plan for Win Win

Putting up w's
As an actor, he usually plays the colorful minor character. Which might explain why when he's a director, Thomas McCarthy's movies feature leading roles that would be bit parts in any Hollywood picture.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 25, 2011

Review: Monogamy

Pseudo-vérité voyeurism
Dana Adam Shapiro ( Murderball ) does a decent job on this entry into the canon of movies about voyeurism.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 25, 2011

More buried treasures from Boston Underground Film Festival

Deep thrills
Audiences have grown jaded as the thrills have gotten cheap, generic, and superficial. But the Boston Underground Film Festival, now in its 13th year, remains a reliable source for the kind of jolts to the system the medium was meant to provide.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 16, 2011

This is the season for unexpected greatness

Spring tryouts
Say what you will about cruelest months, but spring is a time of hope. It's a time when the dead revive, appearances deceive, expectations are reversed, and secret identities are revealed.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 16, 2011

Review: Kill the Irishman

"There's a bit o' good in every Irishman"...and in this slick gangster biopic
Jonathan Hensleigh's slick bio-pic of '70s Cleveland gangster Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) starts with a scene out of Casino and continues to draw from the Scorsese playlist throughout.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 16, 2011

Review: The Lincoln Lawyer

Slick legal mystery plays like an above-average TV crime show pilot
As nondescript as its title, Brad Furman's slick legal mystery, adapted from a Michael Connelly novel, plays like an above-average TV pilot until it gets greedy and runs 20 minutes too long, with a few too many endings.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 17, 2011

Review: I Saw the Devil

Gruesome repetition is a big part of serial killing and this Korean horror film
Kim Jee-woon, whose previous film was the Sergio Leone spoof The Good, the Bad, the Weird, doesn't so much parody genres as he beats them senseless with a stick - much the way his hero, special agent Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun), does to those who piss him off.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 17, 2011

Review: Envy

Who envies who? You'll want to stick around to find out
The MFA's Turkish Film Festival opens with Zeki Demirkubuz's stark and deliberate meditation on the title vice. Who envies who, however, becomes clear only gradually, and the reason for the malignancy remains, as in the case of Iago, inexplicable.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 17, 2011

Blood will out in the Chabrol tribute at Harvard Film Archive

Dead reckoning
Like Eric Rohmer, the fellow New Wave founder with whom he collaborated on the Alfred Hitchcock study that helped launch the auteur theory, Claude Chabrol made films about people who like to talk. They talk about frustrated desires, bungled liaisons, bourgeois pleasures and vices. But one significant difference between the two filmmakers is that with Chabrol, more often than not, the discussions are resolved by murder.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 10, 2011

Xavier Dolan lowers the pulse in his second film

Irregular Heartbeats
Although it opens with a quote from Alfred de Musset praising "love without reason," by the end, the movie is more about reasons than love.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 10, 2011

Review: Elektra Luxx

Porn satire that's neither satiric nor sexy.
Sebastián Gutiérrez joins the ranks of directors who have employed their wives or loved ones as sex objects in their pictures. Unfortunately, he has none of the talent of a Jean-Luc Godard or even a Brian De Palma.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 10, 2011

Lee Chang-dong's oblique, affecting film

Poetic justice
Mija (Yun Jung-hee) is 60ish but still a looker, a quality she's aware of. She dresses elegantly even when she's going about her chores as a cleaning woman — which include bathing Mr. Kang (Kim Hi-ra), the elderly, paralyzed patriarch of the family who've hired her.

By: PETER KEOUGH | March 03, 2011

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