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Peter Keough

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

Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Knight of the Iguana: Nicolas Cage at his best
Nicolas Cage is at his best in Bad Lieutenant

By PETER KEOUGH | November 24, 2009

Review: The Road

No country for all men: John Hillcoat doesn't stray from Cormac McCarthy's Road
John Hillcoat doesn't stray from Cormac McCarthy's Road For those who found the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men too lighthearted, John Hillcoat's relentlessly faithful version of the author's post-apocalyptic Pulitzer-winning novel might hit the spot.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 24, 2009

Interview: Nicolas Cage

Xtreme acting
"When people like to label any kind of performance as over the top, I suggest that if you were to go to the Guggenheim and look at a Francis Bacon, would you call that over the top?"

By PETER KEOUGH | November 24, 2009

Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Welcome to the Dahl-house
In The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson excelled at telling adult stories with childlike whimsy. Telling children’s stories with adult whimsy is another matter.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 25, 2009

Swine fever: An evening with Hunter S. Thompson

Buy the ticket, take the ride
Only Hunter S. Thompson could come up with a line like that; no one else had his knack for the near-Biblical proverb. Few writers outside of Madison Avenue or the New Testament can sum up a zeitgeist so cannily in a phrase.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 24, 2009

Review: Oh My God

Ringo Starr, authority on religion
If Michael Moore can bring in Wallace Shawn as an economics expert, I guess director Peter Rodger can enlist Ringo Starr as an authority on religion in his worldwide search for an answer to the question “Who is God?”

By PETER KEOUGH | November 25, 2009

Review: Precious

Purple's prose makes for wrenching melodrama
If you thought Celie in Alice Walker's The Color Purple had a tough time of it, wait till you get a load of Precious.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 18, 2009

Invisible playmates

Paul Auster makes promiscuity a virtue
To judge from the titles of some of his recent novels — The Book of Illusion s, Oracle Night , Man in the Dark , and now Invisible — Paul Auster's fiction is receding, Samuel Beckett style, into non-existence.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 18, 2009

Review: Planet 51

Even aliens get paranoid sometimes
The opening for the latest animated kids’ fantasy is promising — but it’s for another movie.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 18, 2009

Review: 2012

Doom and doomer: the bullshit hits the fans
Doomsday is good therapy. What does it matter that billions die if that brings a family together in one big hug?

By PETER KEOUGH | November 12, 2009

Review: Within the Whirlwind

Emily Watson faces her accusers
Those eager to compare the Obama administration to a Communist dictatorship might check out this story based on the memoirs of the poet Evgenia Ginzburg.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 11, 2009

Review: (Untitled)

Jonathan Parker's a little too comfortably bourgeois
Woody Allen might have passed on making this film 35 years ago because it was too dated and middlebrow.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 11, 2009

Review: Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon

Spellbound with spreadsheets, but without character development
Despite being pummeled by Mary Mazzio’s infomercial-like film into believing so, I still think that the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship is a worthwhile cause.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 11, 2009

Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Bleating hearts tame Goats
Here’s a subject that really could have used a Stanley Kubrick or a John Frankenheimer or a Robert Altman. But are there any great cinematic satirists left, auteurs with the knack for black comedy and cold-blooded irony?

By PETER KEOUGH | November 06, 2009

Review: Disney's A Christmas Carol

State-of-the-art technology allows actors to reach new heights of hamminess
Charles Dickens made a mint with readings of A Christmas Carol , but a century and a half of technological progress has not been kind to the property.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 09, 2009

Review: Gentlemen Broncos

Jared Hess's latest geek fantasy
Having peaked with his debut, Napoleon Dynamite , Jared Hess has settled into being a family-friendly John Waters — which is redundant, since Waters is already rated PG-13.

By PETER KEOUGH | November 04, 2009

Review: 35 Shots of Rum

Claire Denis's film goes down smooth, but with a subtle kick
Most American filmmakers would focus on the multicultural aspect of 35 Shots of Rum — Claire Denis takes it for granted that her characters are immigrants and doesn’t turn her film into a political discussion.

By PETER KEOUGH | October 28, 2009