Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a new action/adventure film that didn’t fall short of the hype. After a long dry spell there’s The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s final installment in his Batman trilogy. The trilogy began auspiciously with 2005’s aptly named Batman Begins bringing authority and awe to…

New This Week A wonderful time awaits anyone who seeks out A Cat in Paris, the constantly enthralling film noir masquerading as a cartoon in this beguiling Oscar nominated animated feature. It’s also a visually breathtaking hand-drawn confection that delights the senses as well as the intellect. This is not one of those cutesy-poo Disney-style…

New This Week Les Miserables, the most anticipated film of the year and the most anticipated screen musical since Chicago ten years ago or maybe even Cabaret forty years ago, got me thinking about the best musicals available on Blu-ray vs. the best musicals not yet on the best home video format ever. Let’s list…

New This Week The first Blu-ray players appeared in the U.S. in 2006. After fighting for supremacy in the Hi-Definition market with competing technology, Blu-ray players and discs were here to stay by 2008. One of the most anticipated early releases in the new format was David Lean’s Oscar winning 1962 masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia,…

New This Week Aside from the obvious greed factor, one wonders why Columbia found it necessary to re-boot its successful Spider-Man series just ten years after the first film in the trilogy, five after the last. Except for a decent Andrew Garfield performance, nothing in The Amazing Spider-Man adds to the original. It’s the same…

New This Week It hasn’t been officially declared, but this has to be the year of Alfred Hitchcock. Opening this month is the new film Hitchcock with Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren as the director and his writer/collaborator wife Alma Reville during the making of 1960’s Psycho. Previously released this year have been Blu-ray upgrades…

New This Week Two years after British director John Schlesinger made Midnight Cowboy, the definitive film about life in modern day New York, he returned to England to make the definitive film about life in modern day London. Whereas 1969’s Midnight Cowboy exposed the grit and grime of a city few filmmakers were willing to…

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…