Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

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…