Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week This coming Sunday, September 26, 2021, will be the 71st time Tony voters bestow their award for Best Musical presented on Broadway for the theatrical season for which they are casting their votes. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of Broadway theatres for the 2020-2021 season, this year’s awards are…

New This Week Universal has released a no-frills Blu-ray edition of State of the Union, Frank Capra’s 1948 film from the Howard Lindsay-Russell Crouse Pulitzer Prize-winning play of 1945. Set in the early days of the Truman presidency, the play was about the Republican Party’s search for a viable candidate to run against Truman in…

New This Week Beasts of No Nation makes its home video debut on a Criterion Edition Blu-ray and standard DVD six years after its Netflix streaming and limited U.S. theatrical run. Making a film of Nigerian-American writer Uzodinma Iweala’s best-selling 2005 novel was a passion project for director Cary Joji Fukunaga. The director of 2009’s…

New This Week 1967’s Thoroughly Modern Millie gave Julie Andrews her third smash-hit musical role after Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. Looking rather shabby in previous VHS and DVD releases, Kino Lorber’s brand-new Blu-ray from Universal’s 4K restoration finally does the film justice on home video. The story from writer Richard Morris, best…

New This Week Unique among home video releases, the Criterion Collection’s Original Cast: Company has been released on Blu-ray, sourced from a newly restored 4K digital transfer. The holy grail for both documentary and theater afficionados, this rare look at Broadway behind the curtain was made the weekend just after Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking musical had…

New This Week Dominic Cooke is one of the leading directors of contemporary London’s plays and musicals. His production of Follies starring Imelda Staunton was filmed and given a limited release as National Theatre Live: Follies in 2017, the same year as Cooke’s first film, On Chesil Beach, was released. Cooke’s planned full-length film version…

New This Week Paramount Presents has released the theatrical cut of Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous on Blu-ray for the first time. Crowe’s Oscar winner (for Best Original Screenplay) was previously released on Blu-ray ten years ago in its Bootleg (director’s) Cut only. The new Blu-ray from a 4K film transfer includes both versions…

New This Week John Kraskinki’s 2018 dystopian horror film, A Quiet Place, was a huge hit. It was inevitable that there would be a sequel. A Quiet Place: Part II had its world premiere in New York on March 8, 2020, but further shows were put on hold as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. It…

New This Week With the DVD and Blu-ray releases of new films still at a post-pandemic premium, most new releases continue to be of classic films, many of them courtesy of Kino Lorber and Warner Archive. Newly released are four of note from Kino and three from Warner. Two of the Kino releases are Cecil…

New This Week The Pianist has finally been given a U.S. release on Blu-ray. The closest the 2002 Oscar-winning film came to a U.S. Blu-ray release previously was on a Region “A” Canadian release a few years ago. Based on the autobiography of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Shout Select release is loaded with extras…

New This Week Finally available on Blu-ray, Criterion’s 4K restoration of Howard Hawks’ 1938 comedy classic, Bringing Up Baby, was well worth the wait. Four years prior to the film’s release, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night and Hawks’ Twentieth Century ushered in the era of screwball comedy with Capra’s film winning a slew of…

New This Week The Criterion Collection has released on Blu-ray a new 4K restoration of Samuel Fuller’s 1953 classic, Pickup on South Street. A consummate film noir, this black-and-white masterpiece, which clocks in at a lean, action-packed 80 minutes, has never looked better. Fuller was a legendary newspaper man before he became a film writer…

New This Week Paramount has been busy now that they have stepped up their Blu-ray release game between Paramount Presents, Paramount regular Blu-ray, and licensing to Australia’s Imprint and other outside companies. Finally making its Blu-ray debut, thanks to Paramount Presents, is Frank Perry’s 1981 film Mommie Dearest, a blockbuster in its day. The film…

New This Week Absurdly promoted as the “greatest production since the birth of motion pictures,” Ziegfeld Follies was the first box-office hit of 1946. Its shameless promotion seems especially ridiculous in a year which would give us such truly great films as The Best Years of Our Lives, It’s a Wonderful Life, Notorious, The Razor’s…

New This Week Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s penultimate film, There Was a Crooked Man…, had the misfortune of coming at the end of a cycle of astute, wryly observed modern gangster films and westerns. It was very much in the mode of Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit,…