Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gasby is the fifth film version made from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. A disappointing seller on its initial release, it was nevertheless turned into a Broadway play early the following year with James Rennie (Dorothy Gish’s husband) and Florence Eldredge (Fredric March’s soon-to-be wife). The first film…

New This Week It’s no secret that the movie business of today’s Hollywood is geared toward the overseas market which is where the big money is. Films that appeal to mass audiences both in the U.S. and throughout the world are more often than not sensationalistic action films, many of which are mindless and forgettable.…

New This Week There was more misinformation surrounding the release of George Stevens’ Shane in 1953 than other film of its time. One of the myths about the film is that it was filmed in widescreen. Another is that it was filmed in both standard and widescreen formats. Another is that it was filmed in…

New This Week Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ third film, Mud is his best film to date and the best new film I’ve seen so far this year. A coming-of-age story in the tradition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the film’s main characters are two fourteen year-old Arkansas boys who live along the banks…

New This Week Released in a long-ago VHS version at 87 minutes, the film’s original 1951 release time, Budd Boetticher’s Bullfighter and the Lady was restored to the 224 minute director’s cut by UCLA labs in the 1990s and released on laser disc at that time. That version has now been given a long delayed…

New This Week In its fifth year, the Warner Archive continues to release DVDs of long unavailable films we thought we’d never see in the format. A case in point is the release of The Hildegarde Withers Mystery Collection, a collection of all six of the films made from Stuart Palmer’s novels and short stories…

New This Week Promoted as the life story of Jackie Robinson, Brian Helgeland’s 42 isn’t quite that, but it is a well-made, if limited account of the first black major league baseball player’s first year in the majors. Helgeland, who shared the 1997 adapted screenplay Oscar for L.A. Confidential with Curtis Hanson and was subsequently…

New This Week Last week I went on a rant about the three worst performances to have won Best Actress Oscars. This week I want to concentrate on a more positive note, showcasing the best actresses never to have won an Oscar despite multiple award-worthy performances. There are five that come quickly to mind: Irene…

New This Week DVDs of classic films not only give us a window into a world of films that were made for most us before we were born, they also provide a picture of the world as it was at the time they were made. Taken in tandem, we can see not only what was…

New This Week In case you haven’t noticed, DVD releases have slowed considerably in the last few years as more and more consumers look to the internet to download movies and TV series for their home video consumption. The problem with this trend is that it could all end suddenly as there is nothing stopping…

New This Week Kino Classics has released the Library of Congress restoration print of 1934’s Of Human Bondage on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. This was the first and best of three versions to date of W. Somerset Maugham’s autobiographical novel. Unfortunately the owner of the copyright of the film, originally released by RKO, failed…

New This Week Oz The Great and Powerful is both fascinating and disappointing. It’s disappointing in the sense that most big films are these days. There are so many big moments that the small ones tend to get lost and the big ones are so frequent that none truly stand out. It is fascinating in…

New This Week It’s been a quarter of a century since the first Die Hard movie was released. I doubt anyone including star Bruce Willis would have imagined he’d be starring in the fifth installment in the franchise all these years later, but star he does in A Good Day to Die Hard. He’s also…

New This Week The prolific Steven Soderbergh has said Side Effects would be his last theatrical film and the HBO film Behind the Candelabra his last movie, period. The fifty-year-old chameleon writer, producer and director has made all kinds of films over the course of a nearly thirty year career, often acting as his own…

New This Week Warner Home Video has released two sets of gangster film collections on Blu-ray under the umbrella titles of Ultimate Gangster Collection: Classics and Ultimate Gangster Collection: Contemporary. The first set features Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, The Petrified Forest and White Heat all given new Blu-ray upgrades along with a brand new…