Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

New This Week One of the most original and fascinating films of 2012 was Cloud Atlas co-written from David Mitchell’s award winning 2004 novel and co-directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. From 1996-2008 the Wachowskis were billed as the The Wachowski Brothers, Larry and Andy, during which period they gave us such films as…

New This Week Sometimes it pays to see a film without knowing anything about it. Such is the case with three films I viewed this week with varying degrees of satisfaction. It was only after viewing Gangster Squad; Mama; and Safe Haven that I read the films’ reviews. I agreed with the generally excellent notices…

New This Week Director David O. Russell has a reputation for yelling a lot in real life, which may explain why his films contain so much yelling and screaming. Sometimes it flows naturally from the situation as in Flirting With Disaster and The Fighter. Sometimes it just seems like yelling and screaming for the sake…

New This Week I first saw Laurence Olivier’s version of William Shakespeare’s Richard III on the Sunday afternoon of March 11, 1956 when I was twelve years old. How do I remember the date? I don’t actually, but per the Internet Movie Database that’s the day the film was broadcast on NBC It was an…

New This Week Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, which opened on Christmas Day, 2012, was a huge box-office hit and an awards magnet, but one I just didn’t have a desire to see in theaters in the wake of the Newtown Sandy Hook massacre in which twenty six and seven year old children and six of…

New This Week One of the first post-World War II Japanese films to find international success, Teinsuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell won the Grand Prix for best film at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival and two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design – Color. The film was noted for its outstanding…

New This Week The sparkling new Blu-ray upgrade of Hello, Dolly! looks and sounds great, but is the film good? In a word, no, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. In a making-of remembrance by Gene Kelly’s widow, we’re reminded that stars Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau and choreographer Michael Kidd were attached…

New This Week The film that goes into the Oscar race with the most nominations is generally considered the favorite. With its twelve nominations, producers Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy had every reason to expect that their film, Lincoln, would put them in the winners’ circle, just as they did The Color Purple twenty-seven years…