Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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).…

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…