Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Vice is the seventh of 2018’s eight Oscar nominees for Best Picture to receive a home video release. Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, A Star Is Born, and winner Green Book have all been previously released. Roma may never be released owing to the whims of streaming service Netflix, which…

New This Week If Beale Street Could Talk, based on James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, was one of the best reviewed films of 2018, a major year-end award winner that somehow managed to miss an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Writer-director Barry Jenkins’ prior film, Moonlight, won three Oscars out of the eight it was nominated…

New This Week Mary Poppins Returns tries to recapture the magic of the 1964 original, and mostly succeeds. The film is a mirror image of the original, with characters and situations in the same mode, but different. Emily Blunt is the practically perfect nanny without Julie Andrews’ lilting voice, but with the same ability to…

New This Week Green Book is an Oscar-winning film in the tradition of Wings, It Happened One Night, In the Heat of the Night, Midnight Cowboy, The Sting, Chariots of Fire, Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, Chicago, and The King’s Speech in which two disparate characters bond over unusual circumstances. As was the case with…

New This Week The Favourite is quirky, charming, and hilarious. It is brilliantly acted, superbly directed and beautifully designed, costumed, and shot. Just how much of it is accurate, however, we may never know. Queen Anne ruled England, Scotland, and Ireland for a little over seven years from 1707-1714 from the age of 42 to…

New This Week Mary Queen of Scots was one of last year’s most anticipated films. Oscar prognosticators were beside themselves predicting back-to-back nominations for Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan and I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie. Then, as they say, the movie came out. Its only Oscar nominations were for Makeup and Hairstyling and Costume Design. Ronan received…

New This Week A Star Is Born is a tale as old as the movies, the talking ones anyway. It made its first appearance under the title of What Price Hollywood? (1932), directed by George Cukor, in which waitress Constance Bennett becomes a star under the tutelage of a washed-up alcoholic director, the real-life alcoholic…

New This Week Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t a terribly profound film, but it’s a highly enjoyable one for what it is – a typical Hollywood tribute to a great artist with an emphasis on the joy he or she brought to the world. As such, it works. It is, after all, already the highest grossing biographical…

New This Week Widows was one of the most highly anticipated films of 2018, widely predicted to be a box-office smash and a major Oscar contender in numerous categories including Best Picture, Directing, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, Supporting Actress, and more. It ended up being a box-office flop and getting no Oscar or Golden Globe nominations.…

New This Week In the Heat of the Night has been given a beautiful 4K digital restoration for its Criterion Blu-ray release that finally gives this Oscar-winning masterpiece its due. Although it was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won five, it has long been critically held in the shadow of two other iconic 1967…

New This Week First Man was one of the most eagerly anticipated films of 2018, and by extension, one that was expected to do well with various year-end awards, yet by the time the Oscar nominations came out last week, it was only nominated for four minor awards, Best Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing,…

New This Week Notorious, newly released by Criterion in a 4K restoration with all the bells and whistles you might expect, is proof positive that Alfred Hitchcock was not the cold technician his detractors claimed. The 1946 film is both a first-rate nail-biter and a deeply moving love story, the two threads coming to conclusion…

New This Week What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?, newly available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, came late in the cycle of horror films in which actresses of a certain age attempted to revive fading film careers by playing leads in horror movies, often as grotesque characters. The cycle began with 1962’s What Ever Happened…

New This Week Bad Times at the El Royale is not a horror movie per se but horrific things happen in it which I got more goosebumps from than most of the scares in last year’s two more highly praised horror films, A Quiet Place and Hereditary. Drew Goddard, who previously directed the well-regarded 2011…

New This Week Black Panther, BlackKklansman, First Reformed, Isle of Dogs, Three Identical Strangers, You Were Never Really Here, Leave No Trace, and Support the Girls are among the films garnering year-end awards recognition that have already been released on home video, but what of the other major awards contenders released theatrically in 2018? Which…