Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Dunkirk is one of the year’s most acclaimed films. Before Christmas, it had already earned 99 nominations and 18 wins from various awards bodies. Critically, it is the best reviewed war movie since Saving Private Ryan nearly twenty years ago. On a technical level, it is an outstanding film. Dramatically, however, like…

New This Week Detroit is the latest film from director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal who won Oscars for 2009’s intense Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker, and additional nominations for 2012’s equally intense hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty. This time they’ve turned their attention to the race riots in the…

New This Week Auntie Mame, everybody’s favorite relative, was based on novelist Patrick Dennis’ real-life eccentric aunt who first came to the world’s attention in his 1955 bestselling novel, quickly followed by the 1956 Broadway smash hit starring Rosalind Russell and then the Oscar-nominated 1958 film that became the biggest box-office hit of 1959. Filmed…

New This Week Your Name., not to be confused with the current Call Me by Your Name, was the highest grossing film in Japan in 2016 and the fourth highest grossing film in Japanese history. Less successful in the U.S., the film earned the 2016 Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Animated Feature, and…

New This Week The Hitman’s Bodyguard contains a plethora of two things I loathe in modern movies, low comedy and CGI (computer generated imagery), yet it somehow works. Ryan Reynolds, who is once again employing the self-deprecating humor that has sustained his career from at least 2002’s Buying the Cow through last year’s Deadpool, is…

New This Week Wind River is one of the year’s best films, a thriller about the murder of an 18-year-old Native American woman on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming east of Boulder Flats, an area as large as the state of Rhode Island policed by just one Indian Tribal Police chief and his…

New This Week The Glass Castle is based on Jeanette Walls’ best-selling 2005 memoir about growing up in a nomad family led by an alcoholic father and a delusional artist mother. The film version is co-written by Destin Daniel Cretton, who also directed. It’s his first film since his 2013 breakout hit Short Term 12,…

New This Week Lady Macbeth is not based on Shakespeare’s famed Scottish play. It is an adaptation of an 1865 Russian novel called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov, which in its day was compared to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Transferring the tale to Jane Austen’s England makes the dark goings-on seem out-of-place, though some…

New This Week The Old Dark House is a film with a fascinating history. Newly restored and presented at the 2017 Venice and New York Film Festivals, the Cohen Film Collection Blu-ray release is taken from that 4K restoration. Directed by James Whale between Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, top billing in the film’s original…

New This Week Spider-Man: Homecoming, directed by Jon Watts, is one of the better CGI superhero movies, featuring an engaging lead performance from Tom Holland (The Impossible), with nice support from Jacob Batalon, Zendaya, and other actors playing his high school classmates. Kudos to the filmmakers for leading the story in a different direction from…

New This Week Baby Driver is a stylish thriller that I thoroughly enjoyed. Like this year’s other surprise critical and box-office hit, Get Out, it is a film that breathes new life into a tired genre. With Get Out, it was the horror film, with Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, it’s the heist and chase film.…

New This Week The Book of Henry is one of the most unfairly maligned films of the year. Written by Gregg Hurwitz and directed by Colin Trevorrow, this character study of a three-person family comprised of a child genius, his impressionable younger brother and his fragile mother is an emotional tour-de-force even if the underlying…

New This Week The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke’s 2001 film from Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel, is his only film not based on an idea of his own. The story of a masochistic music professor looking for perfection in her student lover, while maintaining an untenable relationship with her mother, was also Haneke’s first commercial success.…

New This Week Beggars of Life, not Wings, the first Oscar winner, was the film William Wellman always cited as his favorite among his silent films. It was the Oscar-winning writer-director’s last before turning to talkies, as well as the last Hollywood film made by Louise Brooks before she went to Germany to make the…

New This Week Beatriz at Dinner, which opened theatrically in June, was one of the most heavily promoted independent films of the year. The hilarious trailer made it seem like a modern-day version of Ruggles of Red Gap in which an English butler teaches a bunch of rubes what it means to be an American.…