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peter keough

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Peter Keough has been Film Editor at the Boston Phoenix since 1989 and has become a familiar figure at the office for his endearing habit of coming to work in pajamas and pestering people for soup. He describes his position as “the best deal a guy like me could get, being a tick on the butt of the entertainment industry.” He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics and The National Society of Film Critics and both organizations regret including him because of his tendency to stuff his pockets with free food from the lunch table during meetings and using his credentials in a vain attempt to pick up women. In his long tenure at The Phoenix he has reviewed thousands of movies, though he admittedly often confuses them with X-rated features he snuck into in the late 60s. Despite his busy schedule he found time to edit the book Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence and Censorship, published by Mercury House Press in 1995. Critics raved, declaring it “a book with a long title” and “full of amusing typos, factual errors and misspellings.” It sold over seventeen copies, most to now estranged family members and friends.

Latest Articles

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Review: Amelia

Plane bad
The hallowed formula for an Oscar Best Picture nomination — legendary figure, pat rise and fall scenario, overproduced visuals and music, a showboating performance from a name actor, reassuring platitudes — falls flat in what is Mira Nair’s worst picture.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  October 29, 2009
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Hardboiled hub

The city’s gritty, criminal underbelly has redefined the dark, artistic vision known as Boston noir
When I was growing up in Roslindale a few decades back — among tribes of ignorant, second-generation immigrant kids whose favorite words began with “f” and “n” and who liked to torture small animals and beat up small children before they moved on to their future vocations as petty criminals, dead dope users, or real-estate agents.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  October 21, 2009
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Interview: Lars von Trier of Antichrist

The director on the redeeming qualities of Antichrist
Maybe it’s the blurring effect of the Skype technology through which I’m interviewing him as he sits worried and Buddha-like in his headquarters in Denmark (he has a phobia about airplanes, among other things), but Lars von Trier seems like an okay guy.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  November 02, 2009
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Review: Antichrist

Lars von Trier’s screams from a marriage
Lars von Trier’s controversial freak-out is Saw VI as told by Carl Dreyer. Is that a good thing? It certainly has grabbed everybody’s attention. I’m torn between dismissing the film as gross-out juvenilia and regarding it as raw religious mythmaking.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  October 21, 2009
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Review: Paranormal Activity

More than cheap thrills
The "normal" puts the chills in Paranormal Activity .
By Peter Keough  |  October 15, 2009
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Review: Whip It

Drew Barrymore's directorial debut falls flat
Add a dash of the sad beauty contests and kooky, dysfunctional family of Little Miss Sunshine to a helping of the bogus hipness and overexposed star of Juno and whip it good and you get an idea of why Drew Barrymore's directorial debut falls flat as a sappy soufflé.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  September 30, 2009
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Review: Bright Star

Jane Campion does Keats — sort of
"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art." That's the first line of a sonnet that John Keats did or did not write for Fanny Brawne, who was in either case the love of his brief life.
By JEFFREY GANTZ  |  September 22, 2009
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October lite

The outlook is still gloomy, but film finds time for childish things
We expected the vampires, the werewolves, the zombies, and the homicidal maniacs. Same thing with the android doubles, the alien abductors, the sexually abused pregnant teenager, the Apocalypse, and the post-Apocalypse. But kids' movies?
By PETER KEOUGH  |  September 17, 2009
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Review: The Informant!

Soderbergh's state of cornfusion
The Informant! opens with a segment that sounds as if it had been culled from Food, Inc.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  September 16, 2009
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Interview: Uli Edel

The Baader Meinhof Complex director talks about terror and glamour
Edel talks about terror and glamour
By MIKE MILIARD  |  September 11, 2009
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The plots thicken

9/11 Truthers, Tea Parties, Birthers — conspiracy is in the air. No wonder Hollywood is embracing paranoia.
Eight years after the destruction of the World Trade Center — the result of one of the most devastatingly successful conspiracies in history — Americans still take comfort in paranoia.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  September 11, 2009
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Review: Captain Abu Raed

Funny and touching
A janitor (Nadim Sawalha) at the airport in Amman, Jordan, comes across a cap misplaced by a flight crewman and takes it home.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  August 27, 2009
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Review: Inglourious Basterds

Payback for Hitler in Inglourious Basterds
From the beginning, Tarantino's obsessive self-referentiality and movie allusions never let you forget that you're watching a film.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  August 24, 2009
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Interview: Quentin Tarantino

The director talks Basterds
Quentin Tarantino began writing the screenplay for Inglourious Basterds more than 10 years ago. When I got him on the phone, he talked about the film's long gestation and how he chose his actors.
By KAM WILLIAMS  |  August 18, 2009
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Hot Nazi beach reads

The new wave of Reich books: pop genres, good Germans
Nazis aren't blitzing just the movie screens this year, though — they're also invading the bookstores, with battalions of novels and non-fiction tomes published or upcoming.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  August 18, 2009
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Review: Evangelion 1.0: You Are Not Alone

Never makes it out of the cartoon stage
Once you get past the turgid and jargony title and backstory, and the dippy English dubbing, this episode of the popular Japanese anime series is really quite predictable and inane.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  August 13, 2009
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Review: 24 City

A complex and lucid cinematic poem
Developers tear down a factory to built the massive residential and commercial complex of the title, tossing out those who had worked there for decades.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  August 13, 2009
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Bottle rocket

Charlyne Yi is a hot date
Who exactly is Charlyne Yi? Two years ago, she appeared — seemingly from out of nowhere — in a brief but memorable turn in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up. A closer look at Apatow's new Funny People , however, might provide a clue as to where he discovered her.
By BRETT MICHEL  |  August 07, 2009
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Loop dreams

Iannucci and the future of political comedy
After laughing at the benighted morals and intelligence and the mordant wit of the reprehensible politicos of In the Loop , I had to ask myself, why now? Wouldn't this film have made more of an impact, both politically and commercially, if it had been made, say, before the 2004 American presidential election?
By PETER KEOUGH  |  July 23, 2009
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Review: In the Loop

Armando Iannucci wags the war
Six years ago, Armando Iannucci's slick and merciless political satire might have drawn more blood, but even now it blows away the recent satiric competition with its sharp, sardonic screenplay and uncompromising cynicism.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  July 23, 2009
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Review: One Day You'll Understand

Clumsy contrivance gives way to real tragedy
In 1987, as French television broadcasts the trial of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi "Butcher of Lyon," Victor Bastien is going through a related trial of his own.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  July 22, 2009
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Interview: Kathryn Bigelow

The Hurt Locker director breaks out
Although everyone makes a point of Kathryn Bigelow's gender and height and good looks, what's germane is that even if she were short and had bushy eyebrows like Martin Scorsese, she still would be directing action pictures like no one since Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone .
By PETER KEOUGH  |  July 08, 2009
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White-knuckle thrill rites

Bigelow puts the art into action
Kathryn Bigelow's art-packed action movies
By PETER KEOUGH  |  July 09, 2009
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Review: The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow makes her masterpiece
Now that the troops are pulling out and the war no longer haunts the headlines, maybe people will want to see a film about Iraq — especially since it's one of the best war movies ever made.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  July 10, 2009
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French disconnections

The new-wavers at the French Film Festival
Last year's Boston French Film Festival featured Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two , and that, combined with this year's Chris Marker retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive and Agnès Varda's fine new The Beaches of Agnès , made it seem almost plausible that the New Wave might rise again.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  July 07, 2009
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Festival atmosphere

Between the Blockbuster and the beach there are the film festivals of New England
Summer traditionally has been the happy hunting ground for Hollywood studios — the time when they unleash their big-budgeted, f/x-heavy warhorses on armies of newly freed schoolchildren and frazzled adults trying to beat the heat.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  June 09, 2009
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Review: The Hangover

Almost all the elements are familiar.
The increasingly tiresome trend of raunchy comedies about bad male behavior finds nothing new to laugh about in Todd Phillips's retread of Old School.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  June 02, 2009
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Review: The Girlfriend Experience

Getting the business
Comparing prostitution with capitalism is about as old as the oldest profession itself.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  May 20, 2009
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Review: Tulpan

Haunting, yet familiar
Borat notwithstanding, movies from Kazakhstan have their share of funny moments.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  May 13, 2009
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Review: 'A Horse Is Not a Metaphor'

Hammer's joy in being alive is no metaphor either
Cinema might not be able to cure cancer, but when wielded by a master documentarian like Barbara Hammer, it can squeeze a little beauty out of the disease.
By PETER KEOUGH  |  May 06, 2009

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