Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week The camera focuses on a middle-aged Irish priest sitting in the confessional listening to a distressed parishioner who is opening up for the first time about being raped and sodomized on a daily basis for five years as a child by a now-deceased priest. Too late to prosecute the bad priest and…

New This Week Arguably the third greatest movie of Hollywood’s greatest year behind Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, no one who didn’t get to see Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington shortly after its release in October 1939 has seen the film as it was originally intended. The film was…

New This Week Among Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray releases are three from Robert Altman, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us and the never on DVD Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. 1973’s The Long Goodbye starred Elliott Gould as an early 1970s incarnation of Raymond Chandler’s private detective, Philip Marlowe,…

New This Week Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises was the recent honorary Oscar winner’s third film to be nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar behind Spirited Away (for which he won) and Howl’s Moving Castle. It was also the 73-year-old animator-writer-producer-director’s avowed last film. Few artists have ended their careers with such a towering…

New This Week On stage, the still-running 2005 Broadway musical Jersey Boys is a crowd-pleasing jukebox musical in which the hit songs of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons take center stage with background information supplied by each of the four actors playing Valli and the other members of the group. On film, the background…

New This Week Philip Seymour Hoffman gives perhaps his finest performance as a German intelligence officer in A Most Wanted Man. Reassigned to the port city of Hamburg after botching an operation in Berlin, Hoffman’s character uncovers the details of the funding of Islamic extremists that has befuddled his bosses as well as the Americans…

New This Week You want box sets and compilations? We got box sets and compilations. Of the seventeen films Steven Spielberg made between 1971’s Duel and 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, nine of them were made for Universal. Eight of them are included in Universal’s new-to-Blu-ray Steven Spielberg Director’s Collection. Missing is Schindler’s List,…