Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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),…

New This Week The Lost City of Z, pronounced “zed”, is based on the life of British explorer Percy Fawcett. In 1905, British Army Major Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is asked by the Royal Geographical Society to act as a referee between Bolivia and Brazil and map out the border between the two countries. Fawcett…

New This Week The Zookeeper’s Wife from director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) is the latest in a long line of films about the holocaust. Although not as compelling as either Schindler’s List or The Pianist, two other films about the Nazi invasion of Poland and the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, it is nevertheless worth…

New This Week The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog wasn’t Alfred Hitchcock’s first film, but the 1927 silent classic was the one that established his style. It was also the first in which he made a cameo appearance. In fact, he made two, and his wife, Alma, had one as well. This was…

New This Week The Marseille Trilogy, the title under which Criterion has released Marcel Pagnol’s immortal Fanny trilogy, was, whether you call it The Marseille Trilogy, Pagnol’s trilogy or the Fanny trilogy, the screen’s first trilogy. Pagnol (1895-1974) was born near Marseilles where he was raised, but moved to Paris in 1922 where he taught…

New This Week Frantz, the new film from Francois Ozon, the noted French director of Under the Sand, 8 Women, and Swimming Pool, is a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 classic Broken Lullaby, which was the film version of Maurice Rostand’s post-World War I play The Man I Killed. As with the previous version, Frantz…

New This Week Beauty and the Beast was a tale old as time put to song old as rhyme when Disney’s animated classic first appeared 26 years ago. The first fully animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, it won for Best Original Score and Best Original Song (the beloved title tune).…