Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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)…

New This Week Woman Walks Ahead is a well-intentioned though historically inaccurate film of the events leading up to the assassination of Sitting Bull at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Grand River in the Dakota Territory on December 15, 1890. Portrait painter Susanna Carolina Faesch Schlatter, called Catherine Weldon in the film, was the…

New This Week Book Club is a film for women of a certain age. That age is somewhere younger than 67, the age of the four lifelong female friends who are the main characters in the film. Anyone that age or more, and anyone who knows women of that age or higher, will know how…

New This Week First Reformed is the latest in writer-director Paul Schrader’s long list of thought-provoking films. Schrader has said that no matter what he does, the first line of his obituary will be that he wrote Taxi Driver. Probably so, but he also wrote the screenplays for two of Martin Scorsese’s other most acclaimed…

New This Week The House of Tomorrow is an unusual coming-of-age film about two rebellious Minnesota teenagers who form a punk rock duo. One, played by Asa Butterfield (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Hugo), is a naïve kid who was home schooled in Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller’s domed house of tomorrow by his former hippie…

New This Week On Chesil Beach is about a 1962 marriage that lasted six hours, the events that led up to it, the events of the afternoon and evening following the wedding, and its aftermath. It’s from an acclaimed novel by Ian McEwan (Atonement) who also wrote the screenplay. Directed by Dominic Cooke (TV’s The…

New This Week Tully is the third collaboration of writer Diablo Cody and director Ivan Reitman. Their initial collaboration, 2007’s Juno earned Cody an Oscar and Reitman an Oscar nomination along with star Ellen Page and the film itself. Their second collaboration, 2011’s Young Adult earned star Charlize Theron a Golden Globe nomination. Theron is…

New This Week A Matter of Life and Death AKA Stairway to Heaven opened in New York on Christmas Day 1946 to a rave review from Bosley Crowther in the New York Times who placed the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film among his ten best of the year the following Sunday while dismissing Frank Capra’s similarly…