Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week The Big Parade, the screen’s first great war film as well as anti-war film, was released just seven years after the end of World War I. As we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the war to end all wars on November 11, 2018, let’s pause to remember and plan to watch at…

New This Week Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is one of the year’s biggest surprises, a totally enjoyable sequel to a film whose popularity I never quite got. While 2008’s Mamma Mia! from the Broadway hit was entertaining with its stolen plot from Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, it seemed little more than an excuse…

New This Week Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a film whose word-of-mouth has long outlived its poor marketing. Officially released in February 1956, Don Siegel’s science-fiction masterpiece did not open in New York until Friday, April 27th of that year as part of a double-bill with World Without End at…

New This Week Three Identical Strangers is an amazing documentary that plays like the best of fictional detective stories. The story begins in 1980 when 19-year-old Robert (Bobby) Shafran begins college in a small town in upstate New York. Greeted by many young people on campus as “Eddy,” it is obvious that he is being…

New This Week Leave No Trace is one of the rare films to receive a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Director Debra Granik’s first narrative film since 2010’s Winter’s Bone, which made a star of Jennifer Lawrence, Leave No Trace has the potential to do the same for New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie. Although McKenzie…

New This Week The Farmer’s Daughter has long been one of the most sought-after titles unavailable in the U.S. on Laserdisc, DVD, or Blu-ray, even though it has been widely circulated in other parts of the world. Kino Lorber has come to its rescue with a stunning new Blu-ray and DVD release of the 1947…

New This Week My Man Godfrey has been given a beautiful 4K restoration for its Blu-ray debut by Criterion. The look of it is leap years beyond Criterion’s previously released DVD which was itself a marvel considering that the film had been a victim of public domain hell after Universal goofed and failed to renew…

New This Week Dietrich and von Sternberg in Hollywood was easily the best classic Blu-ray release within the last twelve months, but what were the other “bests” of this period? Looking back and slightly ahead, here are my top picks from October 2017 through September 2018: October 2017 Best New Release – Baby Driver (2017)…