Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week The Randolph Scott Collection on Blu-ray from Mill Creek, featuring 12 of the actor’s films for Columbia, with prints provided by Sony, was supposed to have been released in April of this year but was held up for six months. The holdup was presumably so that they could add commentary to the…

New This Week Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg are actors so associated with Boston, Massachusetts, the city of their birth, that it’s interesting to find them both expanding their repertoires to play characters from western states in their latest films. Damon plays an out-of-work oil worker from Stillwater, Oklahoma who travels to Marseilles, France to…

New This Week With Halloween upon us, this is the season for scary movies. Warner Archive has released Blu-ray upgrades of one of the seminal horror films from the 1930s and two from the 1940s. Criterion has released a Blu-ray upgrade of one of the best remembered science fiction horror films of the 1950s. The…

New This Week The Criterion Collection has released a content-loaded two-disc 4K digital restoration of Raoul Walsh’s seminal 1941 actioner High Sierra on Blu-ray. Marking the moment when the gritty gangster films of the 1930s began giving way to the romantic fatalism of 1940s film noir, to quote the notes on the Blu-ray case’s back…

New This Week VCI Entertainment has released a 4K restoration of Angel on My Shoulder in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack. This is significant as the 1946 classic has long been confined to public domain hell giving the impression that this was a shoddily made B-film, not the major production it was. The restoration brings it…

New This Week The Criterion Collection has released state-of-the-art restorations of Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned on Blu-ray. Released in 1986, Mona Lisa was the breakthrough film of writer-director Jordan who two years earlier had scored a cult hit with The Company of Wolves. His future successes would include The Crying…

New This Week Warner Archive has released Blu-ray upgrades of The Naked Spur, The Window, and Santa Fe Trail. The Naked Spur was the third of eight collaborations between James Stewart and director Anthony Mann, five of which were westerns. Winchester ‘73 and Bend of the River came before, The Far Country and The Man…