Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week 2013 was supposed to be the year Berlin based actor Daniel Bruhl broke through to international stardom. He had the co-lead in two major films, Ron Howard’s Rush and Bill Condon’s The Fifth Estate. Unfortunately for him both films flopped at the box office. Despite its box office failure, Bruhl was still…

New This Week With most of this year’s Oscar nominations coming from films released in October 2013 or later, home video releases of the major contenders have been non-existent until now. Finally we have Captain Phillips, nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Blue Jasmine, nominated for three, released to home video. In…

New This Week To me Lee Daniels’ The Butler is a missed opportunity at best. In 1979, there was a superb 9 hour TV mini-series called Backstairs at the White House which followed the true story of mother and daughter domestics Maggie and Lillian Rogers, brilliantly played by Olivia Cole and Leslie Uggams, through eught…

New This Week Two very different comedies about sex addiction are among the new releases available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s writing and directing debut, Don Jon, is the better of the two. An often hilarious take on Don Juan filtered through Saturday Night Fever, Gordon-Levitt’s character is a hip young man living…

New This Week 2014 is the 75th anniversary of films released in 1939, often cited as the greatest year in the history of the movies. It is also the 50th anniversary of films released in 1964 and the 25th anniversary of films released in 1989. Will we see very many anniversary edition DVDs and Blu-rays…

New This Week It’s the end of the year, time to review the year in DVD. This year’s best DVD releases include both recent theatrical releases as well as a goodly share of classic film upgrades. Let’s split the best contemporary films released on Blu-ray and standard DVD this year between those released theatrically in…

New This Week It’s Christmas, so what do we get from the DVD gods? Why, films focusing on murder and mayhem, of course. There’s more mayhem than murder in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, an unsettling account of a man whose life is destroyed by false accusations in one of the films on Oscar’s short list…

New This Week Disney’s new film Saving Mr. Banks is a tribute to the perseverance of Walt Disney in getting Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers to allow him to make a film of her beloved character. The Disney studio is just as earnestly trying to get the legion of lovers of Mary Poppins to see…

New This Week Long regarded as one of the great films of the 1970s, the greatest in my estimation, Robert Altman’ 1975 masterpiece, Nashville has finally been given the deluxe treatment on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Set over the course of a few pivotal days in the country music capital, the film features Altman’s patented…

New This Week Is your life too hectic to schedule weekly viewings of even your most cherished TV shows? Does it frustrate you to have to wait a whole week to find out what’s going to happen next to your favorite characters? Now with full seasons of shows conveniently streamed or packaged in one DVD…

New This Week Sight & Sound, the influential British film monthly began publication in 1932. Since 1952 they have compiled and published a list of the ten greatest films of all time submitted by film critics, and latterly, film directors, from around the world. Interestingly, Orson Welles’Citizen Kane, which had led the poll from 1962…

New This Week It was fifty years ago this week that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated, a momentous event that no one who lived through it will ever forget. It was the first national tragedy that was played out before the public’s eyes on television and that medium…

New This Week Six of the week’s seven classic film upgrades on Blu-ray are from Warner Bros., the seventh is from Fox. A fitting Veterans Day release, William Wyler’s masterpiece, 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives, is the quintessential film about the hardships faced by World War II’s homecoming G.I.s. Its universal appeal holds…

New This Week Today is Election Day in the U.S. For those of you in this country, how do you plan to spend your evening after the polls have closed? Will you stay close to your smart phone, computer or TV waiting for the returns or will you completely tune out and read a book…

New This Week Movie production has changed so much in the eighteen years, that it seems incredible now that 1995’s sleeper hit, Before Sunrise, which was made on a shoestring, was in fact a major studio production. It was made by Columbia. Nine years later, the sequel Before Sunset was produced by another major studio,…