Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week The Criterion Collection has released a 4K digital restoration of Leo McCarey’s Love Affair by the Museum of Modern Art on Blu-ray. Long consigned to public domain hell, release prints of the film until now have all been regretfully dismal. McCarey liked the story so much he filmed it twice. His 1957…

New This Week Few films have seen as many DVD and Blu-ray releases as Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy classic Some Like It Hot starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. The 2001 DVD release from MGM, the initial Blu-ray release from Warner Brothers in 2011, and the Criterion Blu-ray from November 2018, sourced from…

New This Week Criterion has finally released a Blu-ray upgrade of Douglas Sirk’s 1956 film Written on the Wind after most of Sirk’s other films have long been available in the format. What is odd about the delay in the release is that Written on the Wind, long available on standard DVD, is the only…

New This Week Jane Campion, who is the presumptive frontrunner for this year’s Oscar for Best Director for The Power of the Dog is already an Oscar winner. She won her first Oscar for her screenplay for 1993’s The Piano, which has been given a transformative new release from Criterion on UHD 4K and Blu-ray.…

New This Week The Hawaiian Film Critics named Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho Best Film of 2021. The British thriller in which a contemporary 18-year-old fashion student is able to mysteriously enter the 1960s and return to the present each morning is a one-of-a-kind experience. With its swirling camerawork, soundtrack filled with 60s pop…

New This Week Australia’s Imprint label has released a Blu-ray of Paramount’s 1954 classic The Country Girl on a region-free Blu-ray. Like How Green Was My Valley, which has suffered fools for decades who denigrate it for daring to win the Oscar over Citizen Kane, generations of Judy Garland fans have dismissed Grace Kelly’s Best…

New This Week Ridley Scott has been extremely upset with Disney for the mishandling of the theatrical release of The Last Duel, one of the films Disney inherited from 20th Century-Fox in its acquisition of the studio. He should be. This underseen film is a much better one than most of the tripe being promulgated…

New This Week Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Universal, is the latest film from the prolific writer-director whose first screenplay was for Sydney Pollack’s 1974 film The Yakuza. That was two years prior to his achieving screen immortality with his screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Schrader followed…

New This Week No Time to Die, the 25th official James Bond film, is one of the best of the series that began in 1962. In full disclosure, I have never been a big fan of the series. Although I’ve seen all the films, I only remember bits and pieces about most of them. There…

New This Week Kino Lorber ends the year with a slew of new releases including Broken Lullaby, Because of You, The Midnight Story, and Mass Appeal. Ernest Lubitsch’s 1932 film Broken Lullaby was the third teaming of Phillips Holmes and Nancy Carroll. Carroll had been nominated for an Oscar for their first pairing in 1930’s…

New This Week One of the best films of 2020 was Regina King’s One Night in Miami…, previously only available via streaming on Amazon Prime. Available now on Blu-ray thanks to the Criterion Collection, this wonderful film can and likely will reach a wider audience. A fictionalized tale of a get-together by four African American…

New This Week Paramount has re-released 1981’s Reds on Blu-ray from a brand new 4K transfer. Whereas the previous release was spread across two discs with extras, the new one presents the entire 3-hour, 16-minute film on one disc, with extras, including a two-hour long making-of documentary on the film hosted by writer-producer-director-star Warren Beatty,…

New This Week Disney has released the Fox Searchlight film The Eyes of Tammy Faye on Blu-ray and standard DVD via its 20th Century Studios subsidiary. The film from director Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) stars Jessica Chastain as the televangelist and Andrew Garfield as her husband, fellow televangelist Jim Bakker. Chastain rose to prominence…

New This Week Milos Forman’s 1981 film of E.L. Doctorow’s kaleidoscopic 1975 novel Ragtime has been given a stunning 4K transfer by Paramount for its 40th anniversary Blu-ray release. Nominated for 8 Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actor Howard E. Rollins (A Soldier’s Story) and Best Supporting Actress Elizabeth McGovern (Ordinary People), the film was…

New This Week Fritz Lang’s first and best Hollywood film, 1936’s Fury, has been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Archive. The Austrian born director of the German classics Metropolis and M would go on to make such well regarded Hollywood films as The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, and The Big Heat, but…