Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Pelle the Conqueror, the 1988 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language film, has been given a magnificent 30th anniversary restoration. The new Blu-ray and DVD from Film Movement features a superb narration by film historian and scholar Peter Cowie. Cowie’s narration fills in the blanks that puts into perspective for modern audiences…

New This Week Get Out and Logan are two of the best reviewed films of the year so far, and with good reason. I was initially skeptical of Jordan Peele’s Get Out as the trailer seemed to indicate another in the almost weekly releases of generic horror films cluttering the market. The directing debut of…

New This Week Universal Classic Monsters Collection, released in September 2015, was supposed to be the be-all and end-all of Universal’s classic monsters on Blu-ray. Well, not exactly. Although collectors were happy to have the eight greatest monster films from Universal’s vaults all in one Blu-ray collection, many were disappointed that Universal didn’t also upgrade…

New This Week Things to Come, the new to home video film from Mia Hansen-Love, is not a remake of William Cameron Menzies’ film of the same name from H.G. Wells’ classic novel that captivated audiences eighty years ago. Rather, it is a wistful French film about an aging philosophy professor coping with the changes…

New This Week Although it was shown at numerous U.S. film festivals in 2016, Iran’s The Salesman did not have an official run in the U.S. until January 2017, making it ineligible for most 2016 year-end awards. Perhaps that’s why its Oscar nomination and win came as a surprise to many who thought that Germany’s…

New This Week La La Land, the movie critics and the Oscars went gaga over, is now available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. The film was so popular that it is almost considered uncouth not to like it. Just the other day I read a review by an esteemed critic who said either you…

New This Week Woman of the Year is one of the best Criterion Collection Blu-ray releases ever. Not only do we get George Stevens’ classic 1942 film, the first of nine films over a twenty-six-year period starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, we get loads of significant extras. The extras include a new on-camera interview…

New This Week Nominated for a total of ten Oscars between them, Lion with six, Hidden Figures with three, and Toni Erdmann with one, all walked away empty-handed, but all three should add to their haul of fans now that they are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Garth Davis’ Australian film, Lion, is that…

New This Week Taken on its own, Rogue One might prove confusing to the uninitiated, but in the context of the Star Wars saga, it makes perfect sense. It’s the missing link between the original three films in the franchise and the later prequels. Featuring a literate script by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy and…

New This Week It was ten years ago this week that my first DVD Report appeared on CinemaSight. At the time, DVD was the king of home media, having been around for more than ten years and having long since supplanted VHS as the preferred format for renters and collectors. Ten years later, Blu-ray is…

New This Week This isn’t a particularly good time for political films. With real life events involving crimes in high places taking bizarre turns nearly every day, it’s almost impossible to take a contemporary political thriller seriously on the big screen. Maybe that’s the reason last year’s highly anticipated Miss Sloane flopped at the box-office…

New This Week August Wilson (1945-2005) was a celebrated Pittsburgh, Penn.-born African-American playwright who is best known for his Pittsburgh Cycle, ten plays he wrote about black life in his native city, two of which won him Pulitzer Prizes. The first was for Fences in 1987, the second for The Piano Lesson in 1990. Until…

New This Week Films about American first ladies are rare, yet there have been more than two hundred theatrical films and TV productions made about just four of them. There have been 38 each featuring Eleanor Roosevelt and Martha Washington and 86 featuring Mary Todd Lincoln. Jacqueline Kennedy (Onassis) is in the middle with just…

New This Week At the 1984 Academy Awards, a befuddled Laurence Olivier, nearing the end of his storied career, came out to present the Oscar for Best Picture. Instead of reading the names of the films nominated for the award, he immediately announced the name of the winner as Amadeus. What wasn’t known at the…

New This Week Sustained grief is something we don’t encounter very often in American movies. You’d have to go all the way back to Robert Redford’s 1980 film Ordinary People to find a popular film as mired in the subject as Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. Both films, though their approaches are different, give…