Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

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,…