Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week One of the most anticipated films of last fall’s movie season, Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, failed to live up to its promise of Oscar nominations for Johnny Depp and Joel Edgerton. Although both these actors, as well as Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard, Rory Cochrane, Adam Scott, Corey Stoll, and others…

New This Week One of Steven Spielberg’s best films and arguably the best studio film of 2015, Bridge of Spies tells the fascinating story behind an exchange of prisoners between the U.S. and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. In 1957, attorney James B. Donovan reluctantly defended accused Soviet spy Rudolf…

New This Week You can get a jump on the remaining episodes of the PBS broadcast of the final season of Downton Abbey with the newly released Downton Abbey Season 6 now available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. For the last six years the show has been seen in the U.K. in the autumn…

New This Week Every year, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces its Oscar nominations, there are several potential nominees whose failure to be nominated is disappointing. This year is no exception. Only time will tell if purging the Academy of long-time members without an Oscar nomination who haven’t worked in ten…

New This Week Winner of this year’s Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy and now nominated for seven Academy Awards, Ridley Scott’s The Martian is an entertaining film that also provides Oscar nominee Matt Damon with his first nomination for Best Actor since 1997’s Good Will Hunting for which he won an Oscar for…

New This Week Roger Deakins has been nominated for an Oscar twelve times without winning. Perhaps the greatest living cinematographer, he may well receive his thirteenth nomination and possible first win for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, a visual masterpiece that ranks right up there with Deakins’ work on Fargo, Skyfall, Unbroken and many others. The film…

New This Week Harold Lloyd was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, but is not as well known today as his contemporaries Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, primarily because he owned his own films and refused to release them in the later years of his life whereas Chaplin and Keaton’s films have…