Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Paramount Pictures was founded on May 8, 1912, making it the second oldest U.S. film studio still in existence. Universal, which was founded eight days earlier on April 30, 1912, is the oldest. Paramount won the first Oscar for Best Picture, 1927’s Wings, two years ahead of Universal’s first Oscar for 1930’s…

New This Week Doug Liman’s Chaos Walking was filmed in 2017 with reshoots taking place in 2019 and an eventual release in January 2021. Critics and audiences familiar with the series of novels it was based on were not kind. Not having read them, I found it a decent dystopian adventure, a genre I don’t…

New This Week Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung grew up on a small farm in rural Arkansas before attending Yale, where he majored in Ecology. Intent on Medical School, he turned to filmmaking instead in his senior year. He studied film at the University of Utah, earning his MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in 2004. His…

New This Week The Mauritanian first captured year-end 2020 awards attention with nominations for Best Film, Director (Kevin Macdonald), and Actor (Tahar Rahim) from the London Film Critics Circle. Both Rahim and Jodie Foster were nominated for Golden Globes for their performances. Foster even managed to pull off a surprise win, a feat she duplicated…

New This Week Judas and the Black Messiah was nominated for six Oscars and won two. It had been nominated for Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Song, and two Supporting Actors, Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield. Kaluuya won as expected, and H.E.R., D’Mile, and Tiara Thomas pulled off a surprise win for the song “Fight…

New This Week Nomadland is the first film since 12 Years a Slave to win the Satellite, Golden Globe – Drama, Critics Choice, BAFTA, Independent Spirit, and Oscar awards for Best Picture. The film version of Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book won just three Oscars but all three were historic ones. Chloé Zhao became the second…

New This Week Warner Archive has released Blu-ray upgrades of Annie Get Your Gun and Broadway Melody of 1940, two musicals of completely different styles from different eras that were only ten years apart. Before Show Boat, which opened on Broadway in late 1927, only operas and operettas had songs that flowed naturally from the…

New This Week Another Round is another masterpiece from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration, The Hunt) who has achieved the rare distinction of being nominated for a Best Directing Oscar for a film also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, or as it is now called, Best International Feature Film. Vinterberg, who also directed…

New This Week Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio was nominated for 15 David Di Donatello awards and won 5 in Italy’s version of the Oscars. It has since been nominated for various other awards including at Oscars for achievement in Costume Design and Hair and Makeup. While the original Italian version has been available for a while,…

New This Week Films about the afterlife have provided plenty of entertainment throughout film history. There have been too many to name them all, but for a sampling, check out 1941’sHere Comes Mr. Jordan, 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death, 1947’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, 1990’s Ghost, 1999’s…

New This Week News of the World was the only major studio release of 2020 considered to have had much of a chance at securing major Oscar nominations. In the end, it only received four for Cinematography, Production Design, Score, and Sound, all of them well earned. It had also been considered a possible nominee…

New This Week Promising Young Woman is the first of this year’s eight Oscar nominees for Best Picture to be released on DVD and Blu-ray. Nominated for a total of five Oscars including Best Actress, Directing, Original Screenplay, and Film Editing, first-time writer-director-producer Emerald Fennell has her name on three of them. Best known for…

New This Week Warner Archive has released a stunning Blu-ray upgrade of MGM’s The Great Caruso, the second highest grossing film of 1951. Beaten only by MGM’s biblical epic Quo Vadis, it outpaced two other MGM musicals, Show Boat and An American in Paris, which were the third and fourth highest-grossing films of the year.…

New This Week Last November, Criterion released Essential Fellini, a fifteen Blu-ray Special Edition Collector’s Set of fourteen of the maestro’s films plus numerous documentaries in honor of the centennial of his birth. As noted in the film’s merchandising, Fellini still stands apart as a giant of the cinema. He is defined by his dualities:…

New This Week The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has been given a Blu-ray release by Universal. Based on Ernest J. Gaines’ novel, the made-for-TV movie, directed by John Korty, whose best-known work it remains, was first broadcast in January 1974 with just one commercial break. It went on to be nominated for 12 Emmys,…