Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Kino Lorber has released a Blu-ray of Mark Robson’s Bright Victory. Previously unavailable on home video in the U.S., this 1951 film was one of the most acclaimed films of its day and one which still stands out. Arthur Kennedy received the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actor over Marlon…

New This Week Sportswriter, screenwriter, and novelist Paul Gallico (1897-1976) received an Oscar nomination for the original story of 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees. He also wrote the original stories for The Clock and Lili among others. His novels included The Three Loves of Thomasina and The Poseidon Adventure, both of which made hit…

New This Week Any time of year is a good time to revisit your favorite films on DVD, Blu-ray, 4K UHD, or whatever platform you can find them on. Autumn, however, is the time of year when I tend to watch the same twenty-five films year after year as time permits. I break those film…

New This Week Dirty Dancing has probably had more home video releases than any other film over the last thirty-five years as its ownership went from Vestron to Artisan to Lionsgate among others in the U.S., 20th Century-Fox in Australia, Columbia in the U.K., and Warner Home Video in France to name just a few.…

New This Week Paramount has finally given us a U.S. Blu-ray release of Lasse Hallstrom’s 1993 film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Swedish writer-director Hallstrom scored two 1987 Oscar nominations for writing and directing My Life as a Dog, a rarity for a foreign film director. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape was only his second Hollywood film.…

New This Week Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat has had an unusual history. Released between the director’s two most critically acclaimed films, 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans and 1999’s The Insider, the film met with mixed reviews upon its initial release but later became a huge hit with younger critics. Mann, who honed his…

New This Week 1955’s The Killing was the third classic heist film of the 1950s following John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and Jules Dassin’s Rififi, but it was a first in many ways. It was the first film version of a novel by Lionel White (The Night of the Following Day) and the first to…

New This Week Criterion has released a picture-perfect Blu-ray edition of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. That Hamaguchi’s masterful creation would win every critics group award for Best Foreign Language or International Film of 2021 was never in dispute. That it would win the Best Film award from the three most prestigious U.S. critics’ groups,…

New This Week Imprint has released a Blu-ray of Richard Fleischer’s 1961 film Barabbas, a biblical epic about early Christians in the tradition of The Sign of the Cross, Quo Vadis, The Robe, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, and the yet to be seen The Greatest Story Ever Told, taken from the 1950 Nobel Prize-winning novel…

New This Week The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is an action-packed comedy co-written by Nicolas Cage superfans Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten, and directed by Gormican. It stars Cage as himself and Cage superfan Pedro Pascal as a Cage superfan who convinces the actor to co-write and produce a film that the two will…

New This Week Everything Everywhere All at Once was heavily promoted as an action-adventure film in which an aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an adventure where she alone can save the world. The film’s multi-universe plot gets her into all kinds of crazy situations. For me, however, it works better as a carefully…

New This Week Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is the kind of film that sneaks up on you and grabs hold when you’re not expecting it to. This is just the fifth film from the 48-year-old Norwegian director of Reprise, Oslo, August 31st, Louder Than Bombs, and Thelma. Although marketed as a…

New This Week Giant has been given an Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Bros. The 1956 film was the fourteenth film made from the works of author-playwright Edna Ferber. Ferber’s 1924 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel So Big was made into a film three times. The 1924 silent version with Colleen Moore is a lost…

New This Week Father Stu is an odd duck of a movie. Based on the true story of Stuart Long, a Golden Gloves champion boxer turned would-be actor turned priest, the film was the brainchild of star Mark Wahlberg who began working on the film in 2016 with writer-director David O. Russell who directed him…

New This Week Sony has released a 70th Anniversary Edition of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and a 65th Anniversary Edition of the director’s The Bridge on the River Kwai in Ultra 4K UHD Steelbook editions of the films. These are, however, not restorations. They are reissues of previous 4K releases of the film, but…