Category: Home Viewing with Peter

Disney has released a 4K UHD upgrade of 1989’s Dead Poets Society. Nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture, Actor (Robin Williams), Director (Peter Weir), and Original Screenplay by Tom Schulman, which it won, the film was a showcase for Williams in a surprisingly restrained performance. Films about beloved schoolteachers have been a screen staple…

Warner Archive has released a stunning 4K UHD upgrade of 1947’s Out of the Past in a package that also includes a remastered Blu-ray of the film, one of only handful of black-and-white films to receive a 4K UHD presentation. Directed by Jacques Tourneur who made his reputation with the horror classics, Cat People and…

Criterion has released a combination 4K UHD Blu-ray / standard Blu-ray Collector’s Edition of Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film, New York, New York. The set includes both the expanded 155-minute theatrical premiere cut of the film on both 4K UHD and standard Blu-ray as well as the shorter, 136-minute international edition on Blu-ray along with a…

At the just concluded 2026 Venice Film Festival, John Malkovich (Being John Malkovich) won the prestigious Volpe Cup for Best Actor for his portrayal of a dying FBI agent in Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine. Malkovich could become the 17th winner of the award to receive an Oscar nomination for the same performance, and maybe…

For my one-thousandth Home Viewing Report, I thought I would look at the film versions of a one-hundred-year-old Broadway play that was filmed three times, the first time 99 years ago. The play is Maurine Watkins’ Chicago based on a real-life incident in which a cheating wife gets away with murder. The lead character is…

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day has arrived on 4K UHD and standard Blu-ray. The highly anticipated film was not the big box-office hit it was expected to be, but it is nevertheless one of Spielberg’s best science fiction films, right up there with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. This is one of those films…

The first wave of Warner Archive’s August Blu-ray upgrades has arrived. The six films included are All Through the Night, Captain Horatio Hornblower, Montana, Sergeant Rutledge, Torrid Zone, and Wag the Dog. 1942’s All Through the Night, directed by Vincent Sherman, is a clever mix of comedy and action starring Humphrey Bogart in his first…

Abandon Ship!, last released on home video in the U.S. on VHS, has finally been given a proper upgrade. Skipping both DVD and standard Blu-ray, Sony has made the film available on 4K UHD Blu-ray only. The film is a haunting look at life and death survival at sea in the wake of a sunken…

Random Harvest, the beloved 1942 film which had long been one of Warner Archive’s most requested upgrades to Blu-ray, has finally been released in the format. Based on the best-selling novel by James Hilton whose Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips had previously been made into equally beloved films, this one’s success equaled that of…

20th Century Studios has released a 4K UHD edition of The Devil Wears Parada 2, also available in a separate Blu-ray edition from the Disney subsidiary The original, released by the defunct 20th Century-Fox, may not have been a great film but it had some great things in it, mainly the performances of the film’s…

Universal has released Curry Barker’s Obsession on 4K UHD and regular Blu-ray. The horror film is the first feature length film from short filmmaker Barker. A major box-office success, pundits are already predicting a Best Picture Oscar nomination for the film as well as a possible nomination for leading actress Inde Navarette. I thought that…

Warner Archive’s impressive roster of June releases has finally been released after a delay of several weeks. From 1932’s Letty Lynton to 1969’s Last Summer, these six new releases run the gamut from pre-code glamor to post-code realism and everything in-between from operetta to mysticism to war to show music. Letty Lynton is of course…

It’s always nice to discover an old movie you didn’t even know existed. This week I found one that Kino Lorber released on Blu-ray five years ago. Called 13 Washington Square, the film was released in early 1928 making it eligible for the first Academy Awards but did not receive a single nomination. It’s a…

New from Kino Lorber is a 4K UHD release of Bill Condon’s 2025 film of Kander and Ebb’s musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman, the third of Kander and Ebb’s trio of Broadway musicals about show business dreamers, and the third to be made into a film over the course of fifty-four years.…

The five films I viewed on home video this past week represent a wide swath of Oscar history. They span ninety-three years from 1928-2020 with twenty-four years between the first and second, twenty between the second and third, nineteen between the third and fourth and thirty between the fourth and fifth, four of them films…