Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week It’s time to take-a-look back at the Oscar-nominated films of 2017 available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Of the nine films nominated for Best Picture, all but The Post, which is coming out next week, have been released. Phantom Thread is releasing today. By now, you should have had ample opportunity to…

New This Week Star Wars: The Last Jedi disappointed hardcore Star Wars fans, but I liked it. It’s true that some of the plot elements make no sense, but the storyline is simple enough for even the most casual viewer to follow. The characters, both heroes and villains, are well drawn and played. All the…

New This Week The Passion of Joan of Arc is a film of the time in which it takes place, the time in which it was made, a film for our time, and a film for all time, one of the few undisputed masterworks in cinema history. Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc in French) AKA…

New This Week The Shape of Water is the first science-fiction film to win an Oscar for Best Picture, one of four Oscars it received out of thirteen nominations, putting it in a ten-way tie for the second most nominations ever of any film. All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land are tied for…

New This Week Lady Bird is a charming coming-of-age film set in Sacramento, California in 2002. Liberally based on writer-director Greta Gerwig’s own life experiences, the film won numerous 2017 year-end awards including Best Picture from the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics, the latter also awarding Gerwig its Best…

New This Week Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a tense and unpredictable thriller with twists at every turn. If you love deep, dark mysteries, you’ll love it but don’t expect a resolution to the mystery of who murdered Mildred Hayes’ 16-year-old daughter. The film is not really about the crime itself. It’s about the…

New This Week The Florida Project is only the third film to be released on DVD and Blu-ray featuring one of the twenty 2017 Oscar-nominated performances. The others were Get Out and Roman J. Israel, Esq. . As such, it should be seen for Willem Dafoe’s fine portrayal of a low-rent motel manager within walking…

New This Week Roman J. Israel, Esq. was the highly anticipated film from writer-director Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler) that underwhelmed critics and audiences when it opened last November. Although reviews of the film were mixed, most critics and audiences agreed that Denzel Washington gave one of his best performances as the title character, an idealistic criminal…

New This Week Only the Brave is a film that all but slipped through the cracks when released last October. The inspirational story of a group of twenty firefighters from a town near Prescott, Arizona, the film follows the narrative of most team-building films whether they’re about soldiers, sailors, or sports figures. They’re a group…

New This Week Westfront 1918 is likely the best movie you’ve never seen or perhaps never even heard of. Made at the same time as All Quiet on the Western Front, the pacifist German film was a world-wide success, opening in the U.S. in early 1931. Banned by the Nazis in January 1933 along with…

New This Week Goodbye Christopher Robin is a unique film that somehow managed to slip under the radar in the plethora of last fall’s film releases. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a very good one that has lots to say about the writing process, not all of it good. Author-poet-playwright A.A. (Alan) Milne…

New This Week Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up to Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner was itself based on Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Hampton Fancher, who was one of three screenwriters on the earlier film, as was Dick, was one of two on the new one. Amazingly, you…

New This Week It, Stephen King’s 1986 novel, was first filmed as an award-winning TV miniseries in 1990. The first part dealt with the disappearance of children in 1960 and the second part with new disappearances thirty years later. The 2017 theatrical version, deals with the first part with the time updated to 1989. With…

New This Week American Made is about a clandestine CIA-run drug-trafficking operation in Central America that was exposed as part of the Iran-Contra Affair during the latter days of the Reagan presidency. It follows the exploits of former TWA pilot Barry Seals from the age of 32 in 1972 to his murder in 1986 by…

New This Week The Mountain Between Us was the last of the major 2017 films released to the home video market in 2017. The film from Hany Abu-Assad, the acclaimed Dutch/Arabian director of Paradise Now, features excellent cinematography from Mandy Walker (Hidden Figures) and the expected fine performances from stars Idris Elba as a doctor…