Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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.…

New This Week Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film, was long disavowed by the director as “not a Hitchcock film”. That was because of his many disagreements with producer David O. Selznick, fresh from making Gone with the Wind. Time, though, sees it differently. Although Selznick overruled Hitchcock’s many ideas to deviate from Daphne DuMaurier’s…

New This Week My Cousin Rachel, like other famous films made from the works of the prolific Daphne DuMaurier, such as Rebecca, The Birds, and Don’t Look Now, was first filmed immediately after the release of the printed work on which it was based. The 2017 version, however, which has been newly released on Blu-ray…

New This Week Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, newly released on Blu-ray and standard DVD, is at its best when it sticks to the interplay between the main characters in the original as played by Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel (voice), Bradley Cooper (voice), Michael Rooker and Karen Gillan. They are…

New This Week Murdoch Mysteries: Season 10 has been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD. It’s hard to believe that the innovative Canadian detective series, initially set in the 1890s, has been around for ten years, churning out thought-provoking murder mysteries week in and week out during its annual run. Retitled The Artful Detective on…

New This Week The Exception is an unexceptional title for an exceptionally fine film. Filmed as The Kaiser’s Last Kiss, the far more interesting title of Alex Judd’s 2003 novel, the debut film of Tony-nominated stage director David Leveaux focuses on the love story between a good German soldier, “the exception” to the rule, and…

New This Week The Circle is a cautionary tale set in the near-future in which social media has advanced to the next step. People are no longer content with just expressing their every thought on Twitter and Facebook and instantly sharing their pictures and videos with friends and family on their cell phones, they want…

New This Week The Promise is an historical epic about the extermination of 2.5 million people in the Armenian Genocide of 1915 that deserves better than the 57,000 one-star ratings it received on IMDb.thanks to genocide deniers, bringing its overall rating to just 5.9. The title refers in part to a promise of marriage a…

New This Week Grantchester Season 3 continues the first-rate British mystery series about Anglican priest Sidney Chambers (James Norton) in the mid-1950s who aids his police inspector friend Geordie Keating (Robson Green) in solving local murders. In addition to Geordie, the series features his close relationships with his married soon-to-be-divorced girlfriend Amanda Hopkins (Morven Christie),…