Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

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…