Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Films about men falling in love with other-worldly creatures have long been a staple of movies as they were in mythology going back to the Greeks. We’ve had films about men falling in love with angels (I Married an Angel; witches (I Married a Witch; statues One Touch of Venus and more…

New This Week Diehard fans of Veronica Mars, which ran on the CW TV network from 2004-2007, contributed money to the on-line Kickstarter website to finance a new film based on the series. The film was made for $6 million, but grossed only $3.4 million partially due to Kickstarter contributors receiving free tickets or downloads…

New This Week Second generation director Jason Reitman began his film career like a house-afire with his first film, 2005’s Thank You for Smoking which earned Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Actor – Musical or Comedy, Aaron Eckhart. His second film, 2007’s Juno earned Golden Globe nominations for…

New This Week William Friedkin was riding high. His last two films, The French Connection and The Exorcist were world-wide box-office hits and multiple awards magnets. His next film, a reimagining of Henri-Georges Clozot’s 1953 French film classic, The Wages of Fear was intended to be his masterpiece. Instead, that film, titled Sorcerer was a…

New This Week Based on Martin Sixsmith’s The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, Stephen Frears’ Philomena takes the emphasis off the child and puts it squarely on his mother. Writer-producer and co-star, Steve Coogan, not Frears, is clearly the auteur on this one. He and his co-writer, Jeff Pope, collapse about 80% of the book…

New This Week One of last year’s most eagerly anticipated films, John Wells’ film of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize winning August: Osage County met with mixed reviews at last September’s Toronto Film Festival from which it never really recovered. Part of the problem was the film’s marketing as a dark comedy which it is not.…

New This Week Just in time for the new FX series of the same name, the Coen Brothers’ 1996 classic, Fargo has been given a spiffy new Blu-ray release. The riotously funny black comedy features an Oscar winning screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen as well as an Oscar winning performance by Joel’s wife, Frances…

New This Week Martin Scorsese deserves respect as one of the premier film preservationists of our time. As a film-maker himself he has had one of the longest and most successful careers of any of his contemporaries except perhaps Steven Spielberg, but if Spielberg’s limitation is, as some would say, that he pulls his punches,…

New This Week Forty years ago a film about an elaborate sting that took place four decades earlier called The Sting was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won seven. This year another film about an elaborate sting that takes place four decades earlier called American Hustle was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won…

New This Week Every year there are films that early on seemed to be surefire Oscar contenders that come up empty-handed when all is said and done. Two of 2013’s biggest disappointments on the awards circuit were Inside Llewyn Davis and The Book Thief, both of which are newly released on Blu-ray and standard DVD.…

New This Week The quality of films released theatrically in 2013 was stronger than usual, but release patterns were as bad as they have been for years, stuffing most of the must-see films into the last three months of the year. Oscar season, which runs from the major film festival dates in Toronto and Venice…

New This Week What can one say about Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity that hasn’t already been said? The film, which was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won seven, was by far the most commercially successful good film released last year. It’s certainly a technical marvel even if the director didn’t set out to make it…

New This Week Alfred Hitchcock was fond of saying that Foreign Correspondent was his first Hollywood film even if technically that wasn’t so. Hitchcock was brought to America by David O. Selznick as a director of hire for Selznick’s film of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1939. Hitchock, who was bound by contract to make…

New This Week One of the best Blu-rays to come down the pike so far this year is the newly re-mastered edition of Chicago, the last musical to win a Best Picture Oscar. With improved picture and sound, it lives up to Lionsgate’s hype as a more visually stunning presentation than it was during its…

New This Week Films about HIV-AIDS have been few and far between. The first film on the subject was the landmark 1985 TV production, An Early Frost starring Aidan Quinn, Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Sylvia Sidney and D.B. Sweeney in a film that centered on the reactions of the family to a young lawyer’s coming…