Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. With eleven nominations each for Amadeus and A Passage to India, it seemed like a pretty even race going into the 1984 Academy Awards, but it came out a bit more lopsided, with Amadeus winning eight Oscars and A Passage to India just two. Based…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 1983 was what I would call an off-year at the Oscars.  There were five good films nominated for Best Picture, but few would call any of them great.  The winner, Terms of Endearment, was the kind of film that might elicit a Best Picture nomination…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. It took Richard Attenborough decades to bring his dream film of the life of Mahatma Gandhi to the screen. The result is a passionate, if somewhat slow, albeit ultimately satisfying biographical film which won the lion’s share of the year-end awards including eight of the…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The 1981 Oscars provides a good microcosm of the awards in general, representing as it does an amalgam of popular and critical favorites among the nominees. On the popular front, we had both Raiders of the Lost Ark, which appealed to the younger generations and…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. It wasn’t until 1990 when critics began to reassess the films of the previous decade that Raging Bull came to be considered the best film of the decade in retrospect. Until then Ordinary People had generally been considered a most deserving Oscar winner and easily…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. It’s hard to believe this is my 200th DVD article for CinemaSight. It’s still harder to realize how much DVD and home movie delivery in general has changed since May 2007 when I started this. Despite the availability now of streaming, i.e. downloading films over…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Women abandoning husbands and children for careers and fathers and sons bonding in the absence of a mother were hardly new to Hollywood in 1979. Films of the late 20s and early 30s were rife with such plots. What was new in 1979 was the…

New This Week The Viet Nam war ended in 1973. Five years later Hollywood finally came to acknowledge it in a big way with several films about the war, two of which were honored with seventeen Oscar nominations and eight wins between them, including Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Original Screenplay. Michael Cimino’s The…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 1977 was the year it all changed. We didn’t know it then, but the youth influenced success of George Lucas’ blockbuster science fiction epic, Star Wars,was to eventually drive movie marketing almost to the exclusion of everything else. I say almost, because there has/will probably…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. It’s a commonly held notion that All the President’s Men; Network and Taxi Driver were the Oscar front-runners and that Rocky came out of nowhere to win the 1976 Oscar for Best Picture. That wasn’t at all the case. Rocky, whose artistic reputation has not…

New This Week The on-line prognosticators who seem to spend all their waking hours handicapping current Oscar races act as though the world is coming to an end because early critics’ favorite The Social Network has suddenly been usurped by The King’s Speech at certain Guild Awards presentations. This is not the first time, allowing…

New This Week Released in June, 1974, Roman Polanski’s modern noir, Chinatown, released by Paramount,was the best reviewed and most talked film released for most of the year. Then in December, Paramount released Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, the second film in his Godfather trilogy, which became an even bigger hit than Chinatown.…

New This Week I’m taking a little break this week from the chronological history of Oscars on DVD to talk about the availability of current Oscar nominees. It used to be that the year’s best films were distributed throughout the year, with the most prestigious films sometimes being given Oscar qualifying runs in Los Angeles…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. (Editor’s Note: Due to the Oscar nominations, The DVD Report is being posted a day early) Oscar went retrograde in 1973 and gave the Best Picture award to the rousing caper film, The Sting, set in the 1930s with the music of an earlier time,…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Nowadays it would be extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible, for the year’s two “best” films to open in the first quarter of the year. Yet that’s exactly what happened in 1972. Cabaret opened on February 13th, nine days before the previous year’s Oscar nominations…