Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week Murder by Death, newly released on Blu-ray by Shout Select, was a major box-office hit in 1976. Starring three Oscar winners, Alec Guinness, David Niven, and Maggie Smith; and six other nominees, Peter Sellers, Eileen Brennan, Peter Falk, Elsa Lanchester, James Cromwell, and James Coco, Neil Simon’s script was a spoof of…

New This Week It was the week before Christmas and all through the large manor house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The thirteen guests were all snug in their nightclothes in their separate bedrooms watching their favorite old Christmas movie. In two of the rooms, Ebenezer Scrooge was being shown the…

New This Week Mission: Impossible – Fallout is the sixth film in the now 23-year-old franchise that was based on the highly successful 1960s TV series that ran from 1966-1969. Not a remake of the TV series, Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt is an agent in the same elite covert operations team that was led…

New This Week Searching, which won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a first-rate suspense film about a Korean-American father (Film Independent Spirit Best Actor nominee John Cho) who searches for his missing daughter on the internet while the police do the legwork. Filled with Hitchcockian level suspense, the film starts…

New This Week We the Animals has been nominated for five Film Independent Spirit awards, the most of any film this year. The nominations are for Best First Feature, Film Editing, Cinematography, Supporting Male (Raul Castillo), and Someone to Watch (director Jeremiah Zagar). Documentary filmmaker Zagar’s first narrative feature is an adaptation of the 2011…

New This Week The Children Act was shown at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and subsequent film festivals before finally being given a theatrical run in the U.K., France, and elsewhere in August 2018 and the U.S. in September. It has now been released on DVD only by Lionsgate with little fanfare, which is…

New This Week BlacKkKlansman is easily Spike Lee’s best film in decades. Taken from Ron Stallworth’s 2014 memoir of his experiences as an undercover black detective in Colorado Springs, who in 1979 posed as a white man in order to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, the action in the film is moved back to 1972…