Peter Canavese
Tomatometer-approved critic
Since 1987, Peter "Groucho" Canavese has been writing film reviews and articles in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle. Peter authors and maintains an exhaustive website called GrouchoReviews and is the chief film critic for monthly ON Magazine (since 1995), and Celluloid Dreams, a weekly radio show devoted to film (Celluloid Dreams runs on KSJS?90.5 FM?every Monday at 5pm). Since 2009, he has regularly contributed film reviews to Palo Alto Weekly. His reviews have also appeared in the San Jose Mercury News (1991-1994), in Bay Area weekly Alternate101 (2007-2008), and on Portland's 1190 KEX drive-time show Mark & Dave (2008).
Citizen Kane, Brazil, Duck Soup, Ikiru, North by Northwest, 8 1/2
San Jose, CA
http://www.grouchoreviews.com
Movies reviews only
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Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania (2023) |
Offers too much sensational spectacle, melodrama, and high-stakes sci-fi adventure ever to bore its audience, but its echoes of exhausted blockbuster tropes ring hollow. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Feb 14, 2023
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You People (2023) |
A tightrope act to have a conversation about race when your priority is to get laughs. Great cast, but by its climax you feel like the movie's the hammer and you're the nail. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Feb 03, 2023
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Cairo Conspiracy (2022) |
A political movie of religious intrigue, well-acted and directed with a good script and great visual appeal. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Feb 03, 2023
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Retrograde (2022) |
History on film. Well edited, bleak...vital journalism. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Nov 18, 2022
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My Best Friend's Exorcism (2022) |
Charmingly and frighteningly nostalgic, touching on feminist social satire. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Oct 13, 2022
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The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) |
Tonally shifty, overlong, repetitive and as history simplistic, but well-made and an interesting effort to reach across the aisle from the socially liberal to the socially conservative. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Oct 13, 2022
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God's Creatures (2022) |
A deliberately paced, bleak, and unsettling morality play that never really gets much traction, spins its heels, and ultimately fails to find a way to make its material interesting. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Oct 12, 2022
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Hellraiser (2022) |
Not as hardcore as the in-your-face, bloody, gory, sweaty, dirty, puss-y, oozing, festering, nightmarish 1987 original, but still honors Clive Barker's concept with a stronger, more-interested-in-world-building narrative. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Oct 12, 2022
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Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) |
The most ambitious of all the Star Trek films—philosophical and metaphysical on a grand scale. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Oct 09, 2022
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Blow Out (1981) |
Brian DePalma's 'earwitness' thriller may just be his best film—strong direction, a good script and self-reflexive in clever meta ways that were before its time. [Criterion 4K] - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Oct 03, 2022
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Catherine Called Birdy (2022) |
Pretty low-key but enjoyable enough medieval coming-of-age comedy boasts a cheeky, naughty sense of humor and a period story complicated by class and the limited mobility of gender. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Oct 03, 2022
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Meet Cute (2022) |
A sci-fi romantic light comedy anchored by two charming lead performances which is less interested in laughs than it is in presenting an allegory of damaged people trying to hold on to love and happiness. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Oct 03, 2022
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Hocus Pocus 2 (2022) |
Marginally improved...and Midler, Parker and Najimy still play their characters with the hammy gusto of 1966 Batman villains. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Oct 03, 2022
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The Story of Film: A New Generation (2022) |
If you love movies, you definitely want to be in this discussion. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 29, 2022
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See How They Run (2022) |
A spirited, meta, frothy and amusingly arch mystery comedy for theater nerds with a snappy script and a smashing cast. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 29, 2022
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The Silent Twins (2022) |
Effective in its refusal to spell out diagnoses or adopt a specific analytic take. Instead, it invites interpretation. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 29, 2022
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God's Country (2022) |
A dark, timely and endlessly fascinating mood piece. Thandiwe Newton is perfection in a deep-dive character study that explores several interesting triangular conflicts. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 29, 2022
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Sidney (2022) |
Perhaps the definitive documentary on Sidney Poitier, touching upon his cultural significance and challenging position as a transitional and transformative cultural figure. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 29, 2022
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Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche (2021) |
A highly interesting document of a pretty potent story told in its entirety. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 29, 2022
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Goodnight Mommy (2022) |
A mixed bag, but there are definitely moments where the performances, direction and photography sync up for an effectively moody atmosphere. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 26, 2022
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The Woman King (2022) |
The diffuse storytelling somewhat dilutes the film's themes but Viola Davis, a Terence Blanchard score and an inherently interesting milieu are all good reasons to see it. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 26, 2022
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Confess, Fletch (2022) |
A triumphant re-thinking of the Fletch franchise with a flat-out great script, confident direction and a stand-out star performance. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 22, 2022
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Clerks III (2022) |
The weakest of the three. It fails at taking its own emotional logic that seriously; the drama is embarrassingly schmaltzy and the humor hacky. Feels like a parody of itself. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 12, 2022
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Private Desert (2021) |
A melancholic and poetic queer romance that teases out some interesting ambiguities about the nature of the story's relationship. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 12, 2022
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I Came By (2022) |
Hugh Bonneville as a posh but psychotic killer with serious daddy issues. So-so script but enjoyable enough as a pulse-pounding thriller. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 12, 2022
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Pinocchio (2022) |
There's an overabundance of unnecessary concessions to modern taste in this effects-driven, CGI-animated remake, but it moves along pretty nicely—and they haven't broken it. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 12, 2022
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Out of Office (2022) |
Lightweight, flimsy and sitcomedic in the style of The Office, but its cast of funny people being funny is enough for a recommendation. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 12, 2022
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Peter von Kant (2022) |
Ozon's gender reversal of Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant straddles camp, but it's colorful and makes a bit more of the obsessive relationship between artist & muse. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 12, 2022
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The Delta Force (1986) |
A dated and morally dubious propaganda film. [Blu-ray Special Edition] - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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Samaritan (2022) |
Well shot, but it doesn’t really go anywhere interesting—a wafer-thin plot, simplistic, and repetitive. It’s all theatrics and no theater. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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Me Time (2022) |
A very strange mix of family sitcom and R-rated bro-down buddy comedy. A witless string of dumb comic set pieces and an unfunny slog. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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The Invitation (2022) |
Comes on like an old Hammer horror picture, but then becomes full of old-hat psychological horror theatrics lacking a single original or interesting idea or performance. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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Katrina Babies (2022) |
A lot of this feels a bit like therapy in front of the camera, but the subject matter is so compelling that, if approached from an emotional rather than intellectual standpoint, it definitely holds one’s interest. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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Burial (2022) |
A tense and compelling World War II thriller and a leisurely shoot-‘em-up made all the more unsettling by its deliberate pace, interesting ideas and timely sociopolitical parallels. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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Loving Highsmith (2022) |
Highsmith's prose, alternately earthy and soaring, best reveals the breadth of her personality, but the perspectives of her lovers humanize her to a more relatable degree... - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 01, 2022
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The Territory (2022) |
In the efficient and consistently engrossing 84 minutes of The Territory...Alex Pritz illuminates the terrible plight of Brazil's Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people, a worrisome situation with implications for all of humanity. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 01, 2022
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Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. (2022) |
Worth seeing through to the bitter end...finds its soul when Ebo allows the satire to curdle into tragedy and the very real pain of its characters. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Sep 01, 2022
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Paradise Highway (2022) |
Ambition...effort...well-intentioned...some genuinely affecting grace notes on occasion, but it's also shameless. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 27, 2022
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Sniper: Rogue Mission (2022) |
A chintzy, corny, cheesy men-with-guns movie peppered with low-wattage humor and a lot of action movie cliches. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 27, 2022
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Spin Me Round (2022) |
An endangered species—an indie comedy with an original idea, which arrives at an extremely funny comic climax. Great Pino Donaggio score. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 23, 2022
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Secret Headquarters (2022) |
Basically a less creative and less idiosyncratic Spy Kids produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (that might tell you something). - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 23, 2022
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Infinite Storm (2022) |
The characters and their interdynamics simply aren't that interesting during the rescue, so somehow it all comes off as dull. But there is Watts (and who wouldn't follow her anywhere?) - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 23, 2022
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Beast (2022) |
The real draw here is actually the photography by Oscar-winning cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 23, 2022
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Day Shift (2022) |
Unpretentious, light, and amusing with a horror-action kick. Ultra violent, but does an enjoyable job of vampire-hunting and vampire-society worldbuilding. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 23, 2022
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Orphan: First Kill (2022) |
A prequel to 2009's Orphan, but despite a plot twist that perks up the story a bit, it's pretty much more of the same. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 23, 2022
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Memory (2022) |
You can pretty much forget about it. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 23, 2022
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Vivo (2021) |
It's fine...the plot is kinda clunky, but it's well cast. [Blu-ray] - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 23, 2022
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Breaking (2022) |
Serves as a low-key character study and an actor’s showcase for John Boyega. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 19, 2022
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Last Journey of Paul W.R. (2020) |
To put it simply, The Last Journey has enjoyable trappings but doesn't amount to much. - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 19, 2022
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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) |
A legit comeback for Raimi...He meets the moment with the good ol' Raimi dynamism and winking movie-love savvy. [4K Blu-ray] - Groucho Reviews
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| Posted Aug 19, 2022
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