Category: Home Viewing with Peter

The Oscars are coming this Sunday. All ten films nominated for Best Picture are available for viewing at home as are the four films nominated for acting awards that are not nominated for Best Picture and all but one of the films nominated for Best International Feature. Here’s where you can find them: Frankenstein and…

Not only have home video releases slowed down, but the processing plants that print DVDs and Blu-rays have also slowed down or gone out of business. That’s one of the reasons for the slowdown of Warner Archive releases. Half of their January releases were delayed until early February and only a measly three Blu-ray upgrades…

Song Sung Blue is a refreshing musical biography that brings back memories of such 1950s films as 1952’s With a Song in My Heart with Susan Hayward as Jane Froman, 1953’s So This Is Love with Kathryn Grayson as Grace Moore, 1955’s triumvirate of Love Me or Leave Me with Doris Day as Ruth Etting,…

The advertising catchphrase for Marty Supreme is that it is about a young man with a dream no one respects, who goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness Now on VOD (Video on Demand), the year’s most heavily hyped film was in production during last year’s Oscar race when its star, Timothée Chalamet…

Two of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Picture have been newly released on Video on Demand (VOD), the successor to Pay-Per-View for theatrical releases prior to streaming and/or home video. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel about the courtship and early marriage of Agnes and William Shakespeare and their grief over the…

Warner Archive has released a Blu-ray upgrade of Rex Ingram’s 1921 silent masterpiece, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the 1916 novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez The four horsemen (War, Conquest, Famine and Death) wreak havoc on the family of Julio Madariaga, a Spanish born adventurer who amassed a fortune in the New World…

The weather outside is frightful but the availability of new film releases for your 4K and Blu-ray collection is delightful. Newly released are 2025’s Wicked: For Good, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, Roofman, and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, on 4K and Blu-ray; mystery classics Death on the Nile,Evil Under the SunThe Mirror Crack’d, and…

Oscar nominations will be announced this Thursday, January 22. Where can you see this year’s most critically acclaimed films? Hamnet, Marty Supreme, and The Secret Agent are still only in theatres as is the blockbuster Avatar: Fire and Ash. Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao (Nomadland, is based on the acclaimed novel about Shakespeare’s son whose…

Newly released on 4K UHD are some of the best remembered films released at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. They include 1990’s Awakenings, 1997’s Boogie Nights, 2002’s Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can, and 2005’s Jarhead. Penny Marshall’s 1990 film, Awakenings was nominated for three Oscars, Best…

The Criterion Collection has released both a 4K UHD and a standard Blu-ray upgrade of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1945 film, I Know Where I’m Going!. This release uses the 2023 restoration of the film previously released on DVD by Criterion in 2010 but imports the extras from that release including Martin Scorsese’s introduction.…

The home video business continues to putter along with Warner Archive, Kino-Lorber, and the Criterion Collection being the primary caretakers of classic films on Blu-ray and UHD 4K while the major studios release much less of their current product in the formats. The business model today is theatrical release – video on demand – streaming…

Warner Archive has released a Blu-ray upgrade of The Valley of Decision, the highest grossing film of 1945 and the most sought-after Greer Garson on Blu-ray title after the still missing Random Harvest from three years earlier. Critics of eighty years ago may have preferred The Lost Weekend, Spellbound, The Bells of St. Mary’s, The…

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third entry in the franchise, is now streaming on Netflix. Unlike the first two in the franchise, 2019’s Knives Out and 2022’s Glass Onion, neither of which I liked, Wake Up Dead Man is an absorbing murder mystery with comic undertones. More serious than silly, with…

The third of Netflix’s big four year-end Oscar contenders, Jay Kelly, has landed on the streaming service. The first of these films, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, lived up to my expectations, and the second, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams exceeded them. Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, though, is a disappointment. The film has a catchy advertising line,…

Warner Archive has released the long sought-after restoration of 1959’s The Miracle on Blu-ray. The film, which until now has only been available in faded bootleg DVD releases if you could find them, was the Radio City Music Hall Christmas attraction in 1959, a big deal at the time. The previous year’s Christmas attraction had…