Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week This week’s two major DVD releases coincidentally take place in the mid-1960s, but are worlds apart in tone, setting and style. One of the year’s best reviewed films, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom set on fictitious Penzance Island off the coast of Maine in 1965, may be the director’s best film. It is…

New This Week One of the best films about childhood ever made, it’s hard to believe that Steven Spielberg’s early masterpiece, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is now thirty years old. An extra accompanying the new Blu-ray release from Universal, features a reunion between Spielberg, co-producer Kathleen Kennedy and the film’s five principal cast members. Dee Wallace,…

New This Week There have been two big DVD stories this year. One is the proliferation of made-to-order DVD releases of long out-of-print titles, many of them having never been released on any home video format before. Fox has recently jumped on the bandwagon that already includes Universal, which owns the pre-1949 Paramount library; Columbia;…

New This Week With Skyfall, the 23rd film in the now 50 year-old James Bond franchise about to open, MGM/UA through their association with Fox Home Entertainment, has released all previous Bond films except for Warner Bros. 1967 spoof of Casino Royale and the same studio’s renegade 1983 production, Never Say Never Again, in a…

New This Week Who would have thought that the best film in general release in the U.S. during the first eight months of the year would be a heartfelt British comedy about a group of eccentric British retirees trying to cope with life in a run-down Indian hotel? Yet that’s exactly what we have in…

New This Week Quick, what role do Thelma Ritter, Cloris Leachman, Debbie Reynolds and Kathy Bates all have in common? Answer, they all played Margaret (Molly) Brown AKA The Unsinkable Molly Brown, the tile of Reynolds’ 1964 film. Leachman first played her in a 1957 episode of Telephone Time and later in the 1979 TV…

New This Week Olive Films has increased the speed with which it is releasing its library of films licensed by Paramount. New Blu-ray and standard DVD releases include five psychological mysteries, some better than others. The cream of the crop is the long missing 1946 film noir thriller, The Dark Mirror with its sensational performance…

New This Week One of last season’s most talked about new TV series, Homeland was available only to those with subscriptions to Showtime. Now that it is out on Blu-ray and standard DVD, everyone now has access to the series’ complete first season. Based on an Israeli TV series, but adapted to American prejudices and…

New This Week Richard Linklater was among the first and most successful of directors to emerge from the American independent film renaissance of the 1990s, so why aren’t his films more readily available on DVD and Blu-ray? Linklater’s latest film, Bernie, is the first to get a Blu-ray release out of the gate since A…

New This Week The year’s first major box-office success, The Hunger Games has been released on Blu-ray and DVD with almost as much fanfare as the film itself. It went on sale at midnight the night before its official release date of August 18th at any retailer who cared to either stay open or open…

New This Week John Ford did not set out to make a cavalry trilogy, but because three films he made between 1948 and 1950 with John Wayne were about the U.S. Cavalry, those films have ever since been linked together as Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy. In point of fact, Wayne plays the same character in 1948’s…

New This Week Whit Stillman has made only four films in a twenty-three career. His first three, Metropolitan; Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco were made four years apart in 1990, 1994 and 1998 respectively, with the fourth, Damsels in Distress made thirteen years later in 2011. That title will be released on Blu-ray…

New This Week Terrence Davies’ film of Terrence Rattigan 1952 play, The Deep Blue Sea, gets the post-war era of still struggling bombed out London right. The story itself about the bored middle-aged wife of a British Judge who leaves him for a Royal Air Force pilot is somewhat less compelling due to the film’s…

New This Week Very few today would dispute Singin’ in the Rain’s reputation as the greatest studio musical of all time, but it wasn’t always so. Released in late March, 1952, the film was a modest success when first shown, but won no major awards. It was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture…

New This Week Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, filmed in 2005 and barely released in September, 2011, was generally well received by the critics although it did have some very vocal dissenters. I found myself decidedly in the middle. The film’s basic story is about a spoiled prep school brat (Anna Paquin) who causes a horrific traffic…