Category: Home Viewing with Peter
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The DVD Report #480
New This Week I didn’t grow up in a world in which there was the easy access to movies there is today. If you wanted to see a new movie you went to the movies. If you wanted to see an old movie you waited until it was shown on TV. With the advent of…
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The DVD Report #479
New This Week Hiroshi Teshigaha entered Japanese film as a documentarian in the early 1950s, directed his first feature film in 1962, and became the first director of a Japanese film to receive an Oscar nomination for his direction of 1964’s Woman in the Dunes. This was quite astonishing considering that Japanese masters such as…
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The DVD Report #478
New This Week Nothing in Otto Preminger’s filmography suggests that he would be the right director to helm one of the most sensitive films of all time, but he proves to be just that with his 1970 adaptation of Marjorie Kellogg’s Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. The director of Laura, Anatomy of…
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The DVD Report #477
New This Week Tennessee Williams won his first Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire and his second for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, two of the most frequently revived plays in modern theatrical history. The film versions of both were phenomenally successful in their day and continue to be among the most cherished…
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The DVD Report #476
New This Week A film with a warped sense of humor, Yorgos Lathimos’ The Lobster had a limited run in the U.S. earlier this year after earning the Jury Prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival; praise on the festival circuit; a BAFTA nod for Best British Film; and British Film nominations for Best Actor…
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The DVD Report #475
New This Week The 1957 film version of Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings, newly upgraded to Blu-ray by Warner Archive, is an uncanny representation of lasts. Porter’s score was the last he wrote for Broadway, although 1957’s Les Girls, written directly for the screen, would contain his last original music. Porter’s music, of course, not only…
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The DVD Report #474
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.…
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The DVD Report #473
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…
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The DVD Report #472
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…
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The DVD Report #471
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…
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The DVD Report #470
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…
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The DVD Report #469
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…
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The DVD Report #468
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…
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The DVD Report #467
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…
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The DVD Report #466
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…
