Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week Meryl Streep is an extremely lucky actress. Not only has the 67-year-old’s career flourished at an age when most of her contemporaries are either retired or given little to do in the films they do manage to make an appearance in, but she’s in the conversation for year-end awards for just about…

New This Week Disney continues to rake in the big bucks for many of its films, but two of its highly hyped 2016 releases underperformed at the box-office so much so that in their first week of release on DVD and Blu-ray, neither The BFG nor Pete’s Dragon gets the spotlight at Walmart and other…

New This Week Travis Knight is making his directorial debut with the brilliantly conceived Kubo and the Two Strings, but he is no stranger to the world of animated films. He was the lead animator on Coraline, ParaNorman, and The Boxtrolls, all of which were among the finest animated films of recent years. Although Kubo…