Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week Ned Benson went from making short films to the very ambitious project that was Eleanor Rigby. Filmed separately as The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her the two films were combined as The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them and released theatrically as simply The Disappearance of…

New This Week When I sat down to watch Fury, I thought of it as Brad Pitt’s World War II movie. I didn’t pay attention to the director. Even after the credits rolled, the name David Ayer didn’t mean anything to me. It was only when I checked his credits on IMDb that I realized…

New This Week The Oscar-nominated animated film The Boxtrolls is another stop-motion masterwork from the creators of Coraline and ParaNorman. It’s a thoroughly engaging children’s film that provides strong entertainment for adults as well. The film, which takes place in fictional Cheesebridge in 1805, is about a boy raised by underground trash collectors who live…

New This Week I have been a big fan of David Fincher’s films in the past. I thought Se7en, Zodiac and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo were among the best films of their respective years while The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button were the very best of theirs. I just don’t…

New This Week From its initial screening at Sundance last January to its theatrical release in August and beyond, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood seemed poised to win the preponderance of year-end critics’ awards. What seemed less certain was its ability to win more middle-of-the-road recognition from the likes of the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild…

New This Week DVD discs have been around since 1995, Blu-ray discs since 2006, yet there are still important films that have never been released in either format and a number of prior DVD releases that cry out for the superior picture and sound of Blu-ray that have yet to be upgraded to the newer…

New This Week It’s time to say goodbye to 2014 in DVD. This year there was no single DVD release that stood head and shoulders above the rest, but there were a number of very fine releases, mostly in the area of stunning Blu-ray upgrades of classic films from the 1930s through the 1990s. The…

New This Week I’ve never been a big fan of films starring Saturday Night Live alumni including those of Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, but The Skeleton Twins, in which the two star, is worthy of exception. Winner of the newly named Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, this comedy-drama co-written…