Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Most of the carping over Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was due to the film’s lack of substantial character development between action sequences in the 2½- hour theatrical cut. That problem has been rectified, at least somewhat, by the 3-hour Ultimate Edition now available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.…

New This Week Last month I took a look at film versions of Broadway musicals of the Tony era (1947 to the present) on DVD. Now it’s time to do the same for straight plays. Because of the sheer volume of Broadway plays filmed, I’ll concentrate on the Tony nominees and winners for Best Play…

New This Week The critical consensus wasn’t too kind to Marc Abraham’s I Saw the Light, only the second film directed by the veteran producer (Thirteen Days, Children of Men), but count me on the side of those who did like it. The film, an early Oscar favorite last year, was pulled from distribution after…

New This Week Ripped from the headlines, Gavin Hood’s drone warfare thriller Eye in the Sky is a white-knuckled, suspense-filled exercise from beginning to end as it focuses on one day in the life of an international team of military specialists. Helen Mirren, excellent as usual, is the no-nonsense British Colonel who is thwarted in…

New This Week Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special is the best supernatural thriller to come down the pike in a long time. It is also one of the few good films to have been released so far this year, which is not surprising as it comes from the director of Take Shelter and Mud, two very…

New This Week Criterion has done its usual fine job of restoring Jean Renoir’s first masterpiece, 1931’s La Chienne (The Bitch), as well as his earlier-in-the-year first talkie, On Purge Bébé (Baby’s Laxative), which is presented as an extra on the release of La Chienne, its first ever home video release in the U.S. The…

New This Week Joel and Ethan Coen have had a strong track record writing, directing and producing films for more than thirty years, so they’re allowed an occasional misstep. One such misstep is their latest film, Hail, Caesar!, an ambitious take on the Hollywood studio system in its last days in the early 1950s. Billed…

New This Week With the 2016 Tony Awards being presented this coming Sunday June 12th, now is a great time to reflect on the Movie musicals adapted from Broadway shows since the dawn of the Tony era in 1947. It wasn’t until 1953 that the hit musicals of the era began to show up on…

New This Week The Weinsteins (Harvey and Bob) are notorious for making drastic changes to films before their release, none more so than the 1998 Miramax release 54, which had been written and filmed by its writer-director Mark Christopher as Saturday Night Fever meets Cabaret but came across as a poor man’s Thank God It’s…

New This Week Film noir, a French term meaning “black” or “dark” film, was coined by Italy-born French film critic Nino Frank in 1946. It’s a term that is applied to the stylish Hollywood crime dramas that were prevalent from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Many of these films were not major hits…

New This Week I finally caught up with the box office phenomenon Deadpool on Blu-ray. I laughed myself silly during the hilarious opening credits, which spoofs both the action sub-genre of superhero movies and the film itself. I wish the rest of the film had been as clever or as funny. Ryan Reynolds gives one…

New This Week It looks like I jumped the gun on Deadpool, which releases this week, not last week. That’s OK, there were other releases to keep me busy in the interim. Acorn has released a superb version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None from the recently aired TV miniseries. There have been…

New This Week The 2015 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Laszlo Nemes’ Hungarian film Son of Saul, is a devastatingly grim account of two days in the life of a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who survives by working for the Nazis. His job is to calm new arrivals to the…

New This Week One of the most highly anticipated films of 2015, Alfonso G. Annaritu’s The Revenant, lived up to the advance hype, winning numerous awards including three Oscars out of twelve nominations. For cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, it was his third consecutive win behind Gravity and Birdman, a first in his category. For Inarritu, it…

New This Week In late 2014, TCM released a bare-bones Blu-ray of Howard Hawks’ 1939 classic Only Angles Have Wings. Now less than a year and a half later Criterion has released a superior 4K restoration of the film on Blu-ray with the many extras that Criterion is renowned for. Hawks was one of the…