Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week World War II raged on the screen in 1942 just as it raged in reality. No less than half of the year’s Best Picture contenders were about the war, culminating in an astonishing total of thirty nominations and ten wins. The British home-front in the early days of the war served as…

New This Week 1941 is remembered as the year in which How Green Was My Valley beat Citizen Kane for the Oscar, a travesty in many people’s eyes but not mine. Both were great films, Valley the better of the two in my humble opinion. The front-runner in terms of nominations was Sergeant York which…

New This Week Almost as impressive as the year that preceded it, all ten films nominated for Best Picture of 1940 are available on DVD. Two of Hollywood’s most legendary directors, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, both had two films nominated for Best Picture and they themselves were both nominated for Best Director. Hitchcock’s Rebecca…

New This Week Often cited as the greatest year in movie history, all ten films nominated for 1939’s Best Picture Oscar have been released on DVD. Indeed, some of them have been released over and over. For example, perennial favorites Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were both given deluxe packaging in…

New This Week Seven of 1938’s Oscar nominated films have been released on commercial DVD in the U.S. Two of the remaining three are available from the Warner Archive and since the tenth film is an MGM film, expect that to eventually be released by the Archive as well. A comedy classic that was right…

New This Week [EDITOR’S NOTE: Today marks the beginning of Peter’s 4th year writing The DVD Report for Cinema Sight. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Peter for his wonderful work these past three years. Your insights and commentary have been an invaluable asset to me and to our readers and we wish…

The Oscars stabilized in 1936 with a strict ten picture roster nominated for Best Picture, a practice that would last through 1943 and return with the 2009 awards. The acting and directing categories were stabilized as well at five nominees each, a practice that has remained in force. Supporting acting awards were handed out for…

Oscar repeated its record twelve Best Picture nominations of 1934 the following year. 1935’s Oscar race gave us equal helpings of action, drama, comedy and music – three nominations for each genre. Action was very much in the forefront this year with Mutiny on the Bounty; Captain Blood and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer…

Comedy is seldom rewarded by Oscar, but in 1934 not only did a comedy win Best Picture, but its two closest competitors were also comedies. Frank Capra’s screwball classic, It Happened One Night was the first film to sweep the major Oscars for Best Picture, Actor (Clark Gable), Actress (Claudette Colbert), Director (Capra) and Adapted…

The eligibility period for the 1932/33 Academy Awards was the longest in Oscar’s history, running from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933. Ten films were nominated for Best Picture including Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley’s 42nd Street; Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms; Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang; Frank…

The Academy Awards were still evolving in their fifth year, which honored films released in Los Angeles between August 1, 1931 and July 31, 1932. This year there were twelve competitive categories with eight films nominated for Best Picture but only three nominees each in the remaining categories, including three devoted to short films, split…

The Academy in its fourth year of awards, honoring films released in Los Angeles between August 1, 1930 and July 31, 1931, completely snubbed the two films most of us consider the two best films of the year – City Lights and The Blue Angel, and almost completely ignored the two we consider the next…

It’s been nearly eighty years since audiences first beheld Lewis Milestone’s film of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, yet the anti-war classic remains as powerful today as it was then. The film’s narrative follows a young German student, who with six of his classmates, joins the Kaiser’s Army in World War…

By the end of the 1928/29 Oscar eligibility year, talkies had firmly taken hold in Hollywood. Silent films were all but dead on arrival at the box office. Panicked studios were forced to insert sound sequences into silent films already in production in order to increase audience interest in their films. Artistically, however, the last…

Now that the 82nd Academy Awards have come and gone, it’s time to take a look back at previous Oscar years and the nominated and award winning films of each year available on DVD. We begin with the Oscar year 1927/28 honoring films released in Los Angeles between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928.…