Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week A wise man once said that the best war movies are anti-war movies. Nine years ago Clint Eastwood made two of the very best. Flags of Our Fathers was a film about the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. Letters from Iwo Jima told the story of the battle for…

New This Week Like Susan Hayward, Paul Newman and Geraldine Page before her, Julianne Moore had so many Oscar nominations over such a long period of time that it seemed inevitable she would finally take home an Oscar last January. Hayward was on her fifth nomination when she won for I Want to Live!, Newman…

New This Week Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner was nominated for four 2014 Oscars for its Cinematography, Production Design, Costume Design and Score. BAFTA nominated it for four awards as well, substituting Make-up and Hair for Score. Neither body nominated Timothy Spall for his portrayal of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), England’s greatest landscape painter. Spall did start…

New This Week Numerous TV programs over the years have featured Paddington Bear who first appeared in a book by Michael Bond in 1958. Twenty-five books later he appears on screen in 2014’s Paddington. An early Oscar favorite, the film opened in London in November 2014 and received BAFTA nominations for Best British Film and…

New This Week Sometimes the story behind a film is as interesting as the film itself. Such is the case with four films new to Blu-ray, only one of which is making its home video debut. Described as an Iranian vampire western, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is none of…

New This Week Another week, and another 2014 Oscar hopeful that ended up empty-handed has made it home to Blu-ray and DVD. Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, a biographical drama about artist Margaret Keane (born 1927) and her husband, Walter, was expected to be one of the major year-end releases and a serious Oscar contender for…

New This Week A Most Violent Year started out the 2014 awards season with promise, winning National Board of Review awards for Best Picture, Actor Oscar Isaac (tied with Birdman’s Michael Keaton) and Best Supporting Actress Jessica Chastain. Aside from a few critics’ nominations for Chastain, however, that was it for J.C. Chandor’s third film.…

New This Week It’s funny how the awards circuit works these days. For decades a film that won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival in September was automatically a major contender for year-end awards up to and including the Oscar for Best Picture. The 2014 winner, The Imitation Game, joined the discussion,…

New This Week The film version of Laura Hillenbrand’s bestseller Unbroken, about the life of Louis Zamperini, was the early Oscar favorite last year with director Angelina Jolie talked about as a potential Best Director Oscar winner and star Jack O’Connell as the next big thing. While the film opened to strong box office at…

New This Week Before the awarding-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi made him a household name, Ang Lee was known for a trilogy of Taiwanese films, two of which were back-to-back Best Foreign Film Oscar nominees. The first of the trilogy, 1992’s Pushing Hands, about a Chinese tai chi master…

New This Week Among the Warner Archive’s new releases is a film I haven’t seen in nearly fifty years, and with luck will never see again. I remembered not liking Frank Tashlin’s The Alphabet Murders very much, but I had forgotten how really bad it was. Tashlin spent forty years in Hollywood from1933 to his…

New This Week Bennett Miller takes his time making feature films. His made his first, Capote, when he was 38; his second, Moneyball, when he was 44; and his third, Foxcatcher, when he was 47. I thought Capote, which received five Oscar nominations including one for Miller, to be one of 2005’s best films. I…

New This Week Winner of three Academy Awards, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is essentially a two-character study about a gifted young drummer and his sadistic music conservatory teacher. Both Miles Teller and Oscar winner J.K. Simmons are excellent in those roles. The film’s persistent and insistent jazz score is so omnipresent it’s almost a third character.…

New This Week Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s multiple Oscar winner, Birdman, is an unusual take on show business. Filmed in what appears to be a single take, the film follows a washed up movie star (Michael Keaton) leading up to and during his Broadway debut in a dramatization of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When…

New This Week The Gilroys are probably one of Hollywood’s lesser known dynasties. 89-year-old patriarch Frank D. Gilroy is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of The Subject Was Roses as well as a screenwriter, producer and director whose TV and film career goes back to the 1950s. His son Tony Gilroy earned Oscar nominations for writing…