Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week 2015 marked the 80th presentation of the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. It would have been the 81st presentation of the awards that began in 1935 except that there was a newspaper strike that began on December 8, 1962 and did not end until March 31, 1963, a total of 114…

New This Week This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the National Society of Film Critics (NSFC) awards, which are usually voted on the first Monday of January of the following year. The society was co-founded in the New York City apartment of Hollis Alpert (Saturday Review) by Alpert, Pauline Kael (New Yorker), Joseph Morgenstern…

New This Week It seems as though the year just began, but now it’s time to sum it all up and give kudos to the year’s best DVD releases. With so few films being released solely on standard DVD, I’ve dispensed with naming the best of a pitiful lot. Instead I’m focusing on films released…

New This Week Every year there are films that we would like to see get some Oscar love that somehow manage to get overlooked. This week I’d like to focus on ten of this year’s films, already released on Blu-ray and DVD, some of which have fallen off the radar, that I’d like to see…

New This Week Of all John Ford’s great films, the one that tends to get the least amount of respect these days is 1937’s The Hurricane. Maybe it’s because the film has been out of general circulation for so long that younger generations have not seen it. Maybe it’s because of the advances in special…

New This Week Nostalgia reigns supreme with the Blu-ray and DVD release of Guy Ritchie’s update of the classic 1960s TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the new-to-Blu-ray upgrades of films originally released from eleven to sixty years ago. The original TV version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ran for four seasons beginning in…

New This Week Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional Sherlock Holmes has been a consistent film and TV favorite since 1900. The character’s latest incarnation is in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes starring Ian McKellen who Condon directed to an Oscar nomination in 1998’s Gods and Monsters, for which Condon won an Oscar for his screenplay. Mr.…

New This Week Inside Out is director Peter Doctor’s first film since winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature for 2009’s Up. It could well win him a second Oscar. I wish that I could join in in the enthusiasm, but I can’t. I find the film a near-miss. It’s clever and cute, perhaps too…