Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Isle of Dogs has already won several awards including one for Wes Anderson as Best Director at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. The six-time Oscar nominee might well win his first Oscar for Best Animated Feature if not Best Picture, Director, and/or Screenplay as well at the next Academy Awards, the film…

New This Week Lean on Pete won Charlie Plummer the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress at last year’s Venice Film Festival. Although the film received strong support at the 2017 Telluride and Toronto film festivals among numerous other venues, it was not released theatrically until April of this year. Directed by…

New This Week Dietrich and von Sternberg in Hollywood is a cause for celebration. Beautifully restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive labs, the collection is comprised of the six films von Sternberg made with Dietrich in Hollywood following their initial collaboration on the 1930’s The Blue Angel, which was filmed in Berlin. The…

New This Week The Curse of the Cat People is not so much a sequel to 1942’s Cat People as it is its own special little film. Producer Val Lewton was given the title of this 1944 film by RKO’s front office and had no choice but to use it. It didn’t stop him, however,…

New This Week The Woman in the Window is prime film noir, one of two back-to-back mid-1940s films in which Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea form an unholy alliance under the direction of Fritz Lang. Newly remastered in high definition, the Kino Lorber Blu-ray is superb in every detail. The Woman in…

New This Week Journey’s End, adapted from R.C. Sherriff’s autobiographical novel and play, has been filmed for the big screen three times, in 1930 by James Whale, in 1976 (as Aces High) by Jack Gold, and in 2017 by Saul Dibb. The play has itself been performed numerous times on stage and TV since its…

New This Week The Big Country, William Wyler’s mammoth 1958 film, has been newly remastered in HD, the new Blu-ray from Kino Lorber correcting the horizontal stretching of the previous 2011 Blu-ray release from MGM. That stretching was caused by the remastering of the original Technirama negative as though the film were shot in Cinemascope,…

New This Week Midnight Cowboy, as difficult as it may be to fathom, was filmed fifty years ago this year. The only X-rated movie to win an Oscar for Best Picture, John Schlesinger’s exploration of loneliness featured performances by Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight whose friendship and loyalty in the film, mirrored the admiration the…

New This Week The 15:17 to Paris may be minor Clint Eastwood but it’s the 86-year-old director doing what he does best, bringing contemporary real-life heroes into a film world largely filled with movies about imaginary superheroes. Ever since 2006’s back-to-back Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood has primarily focused on…

New This Week Black Panther is a fictional superhero that first appeared in Marvel Comics in July 1966 inFantastic Four #52. Black Panther’s real name is T’Challa, king and protector of the fictional African nation of Wakanda. Along with possessing enhanced abilities achieved through ancient Wakandan rituals of drinking the essence of the heart-shaped herb,…

New This Week Moonrise has one of the most deservedly famous opening sequences in film history. Three men are seen walking from the waist down. As they approach a stair it becomes clear that two of the men are accompanying the third to a hanging. The executioner is seen pulling the lever in silhouette and…

New This Week Winchester from the Spierig Brothers, German born Australia-based directors Michael and Peter Spierig, despite my initial misgivings is an interesting suspense thriller based on an episode in the life of eccentric heiress Sarah Winchester. It’s 1906, and 66-year-old Winchester, played by the enigmatic Helen Mirren, is the subject of a psychiatric examination…

New This Week Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool and films about them don’t succeed at the box-office or apparently on home video either. The film, from Peter Turner’s memoir about the last days of Oscar-winning actress Gloria Grahame, was shown at various film festivals, most notably Telluride and Toronto in September 2017, and opened…

New This Week The Post was the last major film released in 2017 and the last 2017 Best Picture Oscar nominee released on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Advance word on the film was that it would be one of Steven Spielberg’s most prestigious in the vein of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Lincoln and…

New This Week The Greatest Showman may not be a great movie, but it has great things in it. It’s not so much a biography of P.T. Barnum as it is a celebration of show business and as such, it works magnificently. The infectious joy of performing leaps off the screen as it did with…