Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Remakes and sequels have been a part of moviemaking from the very beginning. Rarely do they come off better than their first screen versions. Two adaptations of previously filmed works that do are Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, easily two of the ten best films of…

New This Week Alexander Payne’s Oscar nominated The Descendants provides Best Actor nominee George Clooney with his most assured performance to date as the middle-aged Hawaiian lawyer and land baron who becomes the primary caregiver for his two daughters when their mother is injured in a boating accident. The film is gorgeously photographed and scored,…

New This Week Its title taken from the first of George R.R. Martin’s thus far five A Song of Ice and Fire novels, HBO’s Game of Thrones proved to be both a critical and ratings hit. The ten hour-long episodes that comprise the series’ first season have been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD. If…

New This Week Two days after winning five Oscars, Paramount released Martin Scorsese’s Hugo on home video in three iterations: DVD, Blu-ray and 3-D Blu-ray. Scorsese’s film excels on two levels, first as a children’s adventure, then as a lesson in film history. The problem is that the two tend to exist on separate levels.…

New This Week Chances are there will never be a film that will give us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about J. Edgar Hoover, the sole director of the FBI from its creation in March, 1935 until his death in May, 1972. Two theatrical films and several TV movies have…

New This Week Universal’s 100th Anniversary Collector’s Series continues with the February release of All Quiet on the Western Front, the anti-war masterpiece that is as riveting today as it was 82 years ago. Called Laemmle’s folly during production because no one thought 22-year-old producer Carl Laemmle, Jr.’s pet project would make a dime, the…

New This Week Universal has been busy upgrading many of its classics for Blu-ray release in this, its 100th Anniversary year. First up is Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Released in December, 1962, this isn’t quite yet its 50th anniversary, but it comes close enough for the new release…

New This Week With the Oscars less than three weeks away, many of this year’s nominees are available on DVD with others either announced for release or soon to be announced. In decades past, the public, critics and Oscar more or less agreed on each year’s best films. That pretty much changed with the success…

New This Week Coinciding with last Tuesday’s Oscar nominations announcement, Paramount has finally released 1927/28 Oscar winner Wings on DVD and Blu-ray and MGM/Fox has upgraded seven other films that figured into Oscar races from 1940 to 1979, four of them Best Picture winners, to Blu-ray. Technically there was no Best Picture winner in Oscar’s…

New This Week George Clooney’s political drama, The Ides of March, newly released on DVD, is the latest in a long line of films dealing with American political campaigns. A timely film, it centers on a fictitious campaign in which dirty tricks abound. Ryan Gosling is the idealistic staffer for George Clooney as a sitting…

New This Week One of the pleasures of home video is the discovery of TV shows you may have missed in their initial run and getting to watch not just one episode, but an entire season over the period of a couple of days. Such is my experience with the newly released first season of…

New This Week The first great DVD release of 2012, surprising to me, turns out to be HBO’s Mildred Pierce, the mini-series adapted from from James M. Cain’s 1941 novel previously filmed in 1945. The 1945 version, directed by Michael Curtiz in the fashion of a film noir, begins with a murder. There is no…

New This Week We can always find parallels to films of the past from films currently in release. This year, however, I am struck by how many of the films in release at year end are reminiscent of films of the past readily available on DVD. No less than seven of the films that figure…

New This Week Christmas is over and the New Year will soon be upon us. It’s time to name the best DVD releases of fast fading 2011. This year I’m presenting three lists, a top ten list of DVD/Blu-ray releases of films first released theatrically in the U.S. this year; a best list of Blu-ray…

New This Week In a year when most new films have proven to be disappointing if not an outright insult to the intelligence, it’s nice to discover a moving, wholly satisfying science fiction disaster film from an unexpected source. The 1968 classic Planet of the Apes spawned four sequels and a dreadful 2001 remake. Ten…