Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week After three poorly received prequels to the original Star Wars trilogy, Lucasfilm has gone back to the originals to give us a seventh film that takes place three decades after 1983’s The Return of the Jedi. J.J. Abrams, who directed the rebooted Star Trek in 2009 and its less successful sequel 2013’s…

New This Week The title of Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film, The Hateful Eight, is a play on words just as Federico Fellini’s eighth full film 8 1/2 was. Fellini, whose film took shape as it went along, had a severe case of writer’s block after the success of La Dolce Vita and wrote the screenplay…

New This Week Inspirational sports films are not something I generally look forward to seeing. After all, not every film can be a Pride of the Yankees or Bang the Drum Slowly, both of which were about baseball, or Knute Rockne All American or Brian’s Song, which were about football. Over the past thirty years,…

New This Week Two of last year’s best films, romantic love stories both, took place in the New York City of 1952. Brooklyn begins in the fall of 1951 and ends during the summer of 1952. Carol takes place in late 1952 and early 1953. Irish writer Colm Toibin’s 2009 novel Brooklyn is the source…

New This Week Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth is thought to be a cursed play. It is never referred to in the theatre by its name but as “the Scottish play”. IMDb lists 98 exact title film and TV adaptations to date and numerous adaptations under different titles, most notably Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 film Throne of Blood.…

New This Week Category fraud is nothing new at the Oscars, but this year there were more examples of it than usual with three performances that were clearly leads pushed by their studios for consideration in support, two of which made the cut and one which didn’t. Rooney Mara in Carol, out on home video…

New This Week Films about newspapers, like the papers themselves, are a dying breed. If they have to go out of fashion, they are going out on a high note with Spotlight, Tom McCarthy’s Oscar winning film about the investigation into the sexual abuse of children by priests within the Archdiocese of Boston and the…

New This Week Introduced with the title card “a picture with a smile—and perhaps, a tear”, Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 film The Kid was the beloved comic’s first feature-length film. Personally restored by the then 83-year-old Chaplin in 1972 and now by Criterion on Blu-ray and standard DVD, The Kid is a triumph in every conceivable…