Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

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…