Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week I tend not to read other people’s reviews of films before rendering my own opinion of them so as not to allow other people’s thoughts to influence my own. This week, however, I made an exception and checked out Rotten Tomatoes’ reviews of The Vow. I had been under the impression that…

New This Week Mixed martial arts star Carla Garano stars as a betrayed super-agent in Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller, Haywire. Backed by cast of big names including Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Angarano, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas, the story is one we’ve seen a thousand times before. What distinguishes it,…

New This Week “It’s May, it’s May, the lusty month of May” or so begins one of the songs from Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, the Broadway show that defined both the once and future king Arthur and the once and future presidency of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy had been elected but not yet taken office…

New This Week The Blu-ray release of Elia Kazan’s 1951 film of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which retains the special features of the 2006 Special Edition DVD, doesn’t give us anything new, but what it does give us is another opportunity to take a look at one of the screen’s great masterpieces. The…

New This Week The DVD release of Meryl Streep’s Oscar winning The Iron Lady gives us a chance to take a look at how the Best Actress Oscar is bestowed these days. While backstories have traditionally played almost as important a factor in deciding who gets the Oscar, in recent years the backstory seems to…

New This Week The film I looked forward to seeing the most last year was War Horse, Steven Speilberg’s film based on a popular children’s novel. The stage version, which takes a different approach than the film, won the 2011 Tony for Best Play and remains popular. The film, which uses live horses instead of…

New This Week The opening scene of Tom Hanks in free-fall, his character’s son’s vision of the actor falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11 in Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is as unsettling an opening scene as any film in recent memory. Following scenes in which Hanks’ character is portrayed as “the…

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…