Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week Nominated for 8 Academy Awards, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is the French-Canadian director’s fourth film to factor into the Oscar race, but the first for which he himself is nominated for Best Director. Villeneuve’s first flirtation with Oscar came with the nomination of 2010’s Incendies, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.…

New This Week One of the few shocking things about this year’s Oscar nominations is that Jeff Nichols’ Loving is only nominated for one Oscar, albeit one of two that should have been slam dunks. One of 2016’s most highly anticipated films, Loving was expected to be a film that focused on the landmark 1967…

New This Week Warner Archive has released a sparkling Blu-ray upgrade of Vincente Minnelli’s 1960 film Bells Are Ringing, the last musical from prolific MGM producer Arthur Freed. Minnelli’s first musical since his Oscar win for 1958’s Gigi, the film is a faithful, albeit nicely opened up, transposition of the 1956 Broadway musical that won…

New This Week One of 2016’s most anticipated films, Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans, disappointed most critics who found it too long, too slow, too sentimental, and so on. Balderdash! It’s a nice old-fashioned post-World War I romance that plays out nicely at 133 minutes. Disney should have given the film a limited release…

New This Week Emily Blunt has been on the verge of major stardom ever since her sit-up-and-take-notice supporting turn in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, but her climb to the top has been slow and not always successful despite stunning lead performances in the likes of The Young Victoria, Into the Woods, and Sicario. She…

New This Week Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and immediately leapt to the forefront of everyone’s 2016 Oscar predictions. By August, however, those hopes were dashed when news stories began circulating about the 1999 rape of an 18-year-old girl…

New This Week Whenever a major recording artists dies, his or her back-catalogue soars in popularity even if they have been out of the spotlight for a while. When a well-known actor or actress dies, interest in their old movies picks up, though not usually at the same level as a rock star’s. On December…

New This Week Spy or whistleblower? Oliver Stone comes down clearly on the side of the latter assessment in Snowden, the triple Oscar winner’s best film in decades. Stone, never one to shrink from controversy, has always been at his best when underscoring the humanity in his characters rather than their behavioral eccentricities. That was…

New This Week Eight years ago, the world was deep in an economic crisis. In the United States, the country was hopeful for change as Barack Obama, the first black president, was about to take office. On January 15, 2009, five days before his inauguration, an incident occurred that many saw as an omen of…