Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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.…

Two recent children’s films dominate this week’s new releases. Maurice Sendak’s once controversial Where the Wild Things Are had previously been filmed as an animated short in 1973 and re-released with new narration in 1988. Spike Jonze’s new film stretches the thin story to the breaking point, but nonetheless has legions of admirers. The original…

Orson Welles called it the saddest movie ever made. John Ford and Jean Renoir were impressed. George Bernard Shaw wrote him a fan letter. Paramount chief Adolph Zukor fired him because the movie didn’t make any money. Then the Academy, in its wisdom, gave Leo McCarey his first Oscar for “the wrong movie”. Not that…

Some day they may make a good movie about Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, but Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel isn’t that movie. Oscar nominated for its gorgeous costume designs, the film looks pretty and is better constructed than last year’s TV movie, Coco Chanel, but is still a vacuous conceit that plays footsy with the truth.…

Joel and Ethan Coen have tried to make something profound in the guise of a black comedy with A Serious Man, one of ten films nominated for this year’s Best Picture Oscar. The film is a re-telling of The Book of Job from the First Testament, in which God sets terrible plagues upon a good…

One of the year’s most eagerly anticipated films, Mira Nair’s Amelia turned out to be one of the year’s biggest disappointments. On a technical level, the film looks great. The period detail of the period from 1928 to 1937 is letter perfect and the recreation of the planes flown by Amelia Earhart are stunning, but…

Films set outside the U.S. dominate this week’s new releases. An overwhelming sadness permeates Jane Campion’s Bright Star, the story of the brief, doomed romance of 19th Century British seamstress Fanny Brawne and dying poet John Keats. Abbie Cornish, who appears in almost every scene, received the lion’s share of the notices for her portrayal…

Canadian director Kari Skogland takes on both the murderous Irish Republican Army and the duplicitous British occupation force in 1980s Belfast in 50 Dead Men Walking, based on the true story of an Irish Catholic youth recruited by the British as a spy within the IRA. The title refers to the fifty men whose lives…

You now no longer have an excuse for not being able to find 2009’s most acclaimed film in a theatre near you. Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, which has appeared on hundreds of ten best lists and won more Best Picture awards than other film this year, has been released on DVD. Although it takes…