Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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,…

New This Week Federico Fellini’s 1960 classic, La Dolce Vita was the fifth highest grossing film of 1961, the year of its U.S. release, coming in behind 101 Dalmatians, West Side Story, El Cid and The Parent Trap, raking in more than twice as much as the next highest grossing film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which…

New This Week One of the nicest surprises of the last TV season was the miniseries Fargo, based on, but different from the 1996 film of the same name, produced by, but not directed by, the Coen Brothers. The protagonist here is Billy Bob Thornton as a malevolent killer, and he’s as good as you…

New This Week Considered by many to be the greatest horror film of all time, William Friedkin’s 1973 classic The Exorcist and its 2000 director’s extended cut re-release have seen numerous DVD releases going back to 1998, as have the original’s four sequels, 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, 1990’s The Exorcist III, 2004’s Exorcist: The…

New This Week For his first feature film, French director Serge Bourguinon wanted Hollywood star Steve McQueen to play the traumatized amnesiac who forms a friendship with a lonely 12-year-old girl in Sundays and Cybèle, but producer Romain Pines told him he couldn’t afford McQueen, but he could afford Hardy Kruger. Waylaid by Pines on…

New This Week An early front-runner for this year’s Best Foreign Film award, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida is the Polish-born director’s first film made in his homeland. The Oxford-educated documentarian and feature film director has made an astonishing film set in the early 1960s and filmed as though it were actually made in 1962. The film…

New This Week Films about death and dying, especially those about children and adolescents with terminal illnesses, are generally not box office hits. You’d have to go all the way back to 1970’s Love Story to find a film about a young woman’s fight against impending death that brought in major coin. You’d have to…

New This Week As comic book movies go, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is one of the best of the CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) era. While I found the first film in the new series, 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger, ultimately disappointing, the new film has a tighter script and fewer players to keep…

New This Week Although Ivan Reitman has produced an occasional dramatic feature film in his almost-fifty-year Hollywood career, Draft Day is the first non-comedic film the director of Ghostbusters and Dave has helmed. Who this film was made for is open to question. It’s not a film for die-hard football fans who have derided the…