Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week Stanley Kramer’s message films reached their apex with 1959’s On the Beach in which the world is coming to an end in the aftermath of a nuclear war which nobody won. Based on Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, the film focuses on five main characters – the commander of a U.S. submarine docked…

New This Week Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is not only the idiosyncratic director’s best film ever, it could easily lay claim to being the best vampire movie yet made. Witty and constantly surprising, the film centers on centuries-old sophisticated vampires Adam and Eve (Tim Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton) who survive on donated blood.…

New This Week One of the landmark TV miniseries, James Clavell’s Shogun, first broadcast in 1980, was an event for which mass audiences stayed home much as they had for Roots three years earlier. The nine-hour film in which the Japanese actors speak Japanese without subtitles except when translating for captured English navy Pilot/Major Blackthorne…

New This Week In the light of the success of The Hunger Games comes the first of a series of films based on another young adult trilogy about a teenage heroine. Like The Hunger Games, the last book of the Divergent trilogy will be split into two films. The plot of Divergent is similar to…

New This Week Last week two by Billy Wilder, this week two by Delbert Mann as Kino Lorber continues to release outstanding United Artists films from the 1950s to the 1970s on Blu-ray. Mann won an Oscar for 1955’s Marty as did Paddy Chayefsky for his screenplay, Ernest Borgnine for his star-making performance and the…

New This Week Agatha Christie’s international stage success, Witness for the Prosecution is expanded and improved upon by Billy Wilder in his 1957 adaptation of Christie’s deliciously twisty murder mystery. As explained to Volker Schlondorff by Wilder in an excellent 1982 interview that is included as extra on Kino Lorber’s magnificent new Blu-ray upgrade of…

New This Week From the 1930s through the early 1960s, film distribution was different than it is now. Instead of major films opening in wide release, all major films, not just a select few, would have limited initial releases followed by wide distribution in neighborhood theatres. In New York City, neighborhood theatres were primarily owned…