Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Two things I usually don’t discuss are a film’s plot spoilers and the ages of its principal cast members. However, with The Age of Adaline, the spoiler is so obvious from the get-go that it’s not a matter of if it will occur, as when, and in a film that centers around…

New This Week Universal has released I’ll See You in My Dreams on Blu-ray and DVD at the same time that the independent film from Bleecker Street Media goes out free as the year’s first screener to Academy and Screen Actors Guild members. Seventeen years after her daughter Gwyneth Paltrow won an Oscar for Shakespeare…

New This Week Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) and Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) were two of five French film critics and friends published in the influential Cahiers du Cinema before becoming directors who changed the direction of French cinema in the late 1950s. Along with Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, their movement, known as…

New This Week Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film The Front Page was the first of four film versions of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 play, which has itself been revived four times on Broadway, first in 1946, twice in 1969 and most recently in 1986. Helen Hayes, MacArthur’s widow, played the mother of ace reporter…

New This Week Thomas Hardy’s 1878 novel Far From the Madding Crowd has been filmed at least five times beginning a hundred years ago in in 1915. The best known version until now has been John Schlesinger’s 1967 film starring Julie Christie as the headstrong heiress and Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp as…

New This Week Here we are in the eighth month of 2015. Windows, with great fanfare, has just released Windows 10 with free upgrades for Windows 7 and 8 users. With smart TVs, as well as smart phones, tablets and other equally intelligent hardware, access to digital media has never been greater. We can now…

New This Week Criterion has released a Blu-ray upgrade of Stephen Frears’ breakthrough film My Beautiful Laundrette. Although Frears had made his feature film debut with Gumshoe in 1971, his interim career had been spent mostly on British TV with only the 1984 British noir The Hit making it to the big screen. Later renowned…

New This Week A welcome surprise, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is not only the best science fiction film to come down the pike in a long, long time, it’s the best film released so far this year in any genre. Garland, whose novel The Beach was made into a film by Danny Boyle in 2000,…

New This Week Helen Mirren delivers another outstanding performance as Maria Altmann, the real life naturalized American citizen who took on the Austrian government in her 80s and won despite their efforts to stall the court case until she died. She would live to be 94. At issue was a painting of her aunt Adele…

New This Week With rare exception, Al Pacino’s films since winning an Oscar for Scent of a Woman on his eighth nomination twenty-two years ago have been disappointing. Aside from his occasional TV work, nothing he’s done in the intervening years has put him in awards contention. His latest, Danny Collins, won’t do that either,…

New This Week Criterion has released Blu-ray upgrades of two more cinematic masterpieces, The Fisher King and The Bridge. The only non-British member of Monty Python, Terry Gilliam achieved great success with 1974’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail which he co-directed with Terry Jones. He returned to the quest for the Holy Grail with…

New This Week South Africa’s Neill Blomkamp hit the big time with 2009’s epic science fiction film, District 9 which took in more than $115 million at the U.S. box office alone and went on to receive four Oscar nominations including Best Picture and one for writer-director Blompkamp and co-writer Terrri Tatcehll for Best Adapted…

New This Week Warner Bros.’ The Golden Year: 5 Classic Films from 1939 gives us four new-to-Blu-ray releases, Dark Victory, Dodge City, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Ninotchka, and yet another release of Gone With the Wind. Dark Victory was a huge hit when released in April 1939. Bette Davis considered it one of…

New This Week There’s cause for joy for lovers of movie musicals on Blu-ray this week as Sony releases the 4K- Mastered Director’s Cut of 1972’s 1776 featuring restored musical cuts from previous releases. While I contemplate the “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men” who “Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve”, I can’t help but think of the fifteen…

New This Week At some point, home DVD and Blu-ray releases may cease altogether with broadcast television and streaming the only way to bring movies into the home. That may be fine for the average consumer but not for collectors. Availability will then be totally at the whim of the copyright holder and licensee. Already…