Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week It amuses me to no end that young audiences that dote on superhero and cartoon characters turn their noses up at musicals in which singers spontaneously burst into song because they’re “unrealistic”. Audiences of fifty years ago had no such problem. Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s, Original Broadway Cast…

New This Week Masaki Kobayashi was one of Japan’s great post-war directors whose most enduring work was 1964’s Kwaidan, the most expensive Japanese film made up to that time. The film, which was an anthology of ghost stories, was a bigger hit outside of Japan than within despite having won a special jury prize at…

New This Week One of the silliest disaster movies ever, Brad Peyton’s San Andreas is nevertheless a lot of fun if you don’t take it too seriously. The film opens with helicopter pilot Dwayne Johnson and team rescuing a woman whose car crashes and rolls down a cliff thanks to her texting while driving in…

New This Week Rumor has it that Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There will be Studio Ghibli’s last theatrical release. If so, the Japanese animation giant will have gone out in grand style. Yonebayashi was a long-time collaborator of Hayao Miyazaki, having worked on Spirited Away and other classics, acting as key animator on such…

New This Week It was exactly thirty years ago that Merchnat-Ivory made their twentieth film, the first commercial success of their long collaboration, a film which stands the test of time better than any of their films and even better than Platoon, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Blue Velvet, the three other must-see films released…

New This Week Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent is the third French film in five years about famed fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008), albeit the first to receive a major Blu-ray and DVD release in the U.S. Both 2010’s L’Amour Fou and 2014’s Yves Saint Laurent were DVD only releases here. Bonello’s 250-minute film does…

New This Week Disney’s live action Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh from a script by Chris Weitz, doesn’t stray as far from Disney’s 1950 animated version as last year’s Maleficent strayed from 1959’s animated Sleeping Beauty, but then any version of Cinderella requires that certain narrative threads be followed. Cinderella’s parents must be good. Her…