Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The Oscar year 1991 may be the strangest one in the history of the Academy Awards. Box office was down more than 6% percent from the previous year and pundits blamed the year’s mostly somber, depressing films themselves for audience doldrums. Oddly, though, the year’s…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The new age western, Dances With Wolves, is direction taken over by star Kevin Costner, seemed like a breath of fresh air at the time. In just two years, however, a more traditional western would reclaim the genre and much of 1990’s Oscar winner would…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. With nine Oscar nominations, Bruce Beresford’s film of Alfred Uhry’s off-Broadway smash hit, Driving Miss Daisy went into the 1989 Oscar race with the most nominations, but it failed to receive one for Best Director, usually a bad omen. What it did have, however, were…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Autism was a subject that no one talked about before Rain Man. 60 Minutes devoted a segment to the subject and the film prior to the film’s mid-December release, giving it an importance no other film of 1988 would have. It instantly became the film…

Featured CLICK HEREfor other DVDs featured this week. Three years after David Lean made his last film, the epic was in good hands with Italy’s Bernardo Bertoluccci who made 1987’s The Last Emperor. Bertolucci’s film is about Pu Yi, born to lofty heights, raised behind the great wall of China, forced to abdicate and endure…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Oscar’s Best Picture line-up for 1986 offered the most varied slate in many years. In the running were a war movie; a complex adventure film, a sophisticated contemporary comedy, an even more sophisticated classic comedy and a high tension domestic drama. Leading off the nominations…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Is this déjà vu all over again? Just as the Academy had done the year before, in 1985 it gave eleven Oscar nominations each to two films, one of which was awarded seven gold trophies while the other went home empty-handed, tying the record losses…

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…