Category: Home Viewing with Peter

I’ll have DVD reviews of Up, Star Trek and the 70th Anniversary Edition of Gone With the Wind soon, but for now let’s take a little detour into the world of CDs. Now that downloads of songs have become the thing to do, CDs that you can actually hold in your hand may well be…

Christmas comes early on Blu ray with the release not only of the holiday classics, A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, but with the releases of 50th Anniverary Edition of North by Northwest, the long sought after release of Forrest Gump and Criterion’s first subscriber voted release, Howards End, as well. Charles Dickens’…

It’s a sad commentary on the current state of movie affairs when a by-the-numbers romantic comedy is hailed as the “best comedy of the year”, but The Proposal is nevertheless a pleasant time-killing experience thanks to the charm of its stars. Sandra Bullock is a cold fish publishing executive whose Canadian visa has expired. In…

Paramount has re-mastered Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic, Chinatown in high definition but has released it only on standard DVD, presumably to make more money when they get around to producing a Blu-ray in another year or two. The perfect film noir, it was made thirty years after the genre peaked but with situations and themes…

Today’s kids are raised on full length animated features on DVD practically from birth.They tend to develop favorites at an early age without any understanding of a particular film’s place in history.After all, what parent is going to entertain an infant with films in proper chronological order? I was fortunate enough to have seen Snow…

Things change. The world today is not the same as we knew it even just a few years ago. One thing that remains constant is old movies. Everyone, I suppose, remembers the first time they saw The Wizard of Oz. For me, the year was 1949. I was five year old, the film was already…

The quality of TV drama has never been better than it is right now, but the ways in which people watch their favorite series have changed dramatically over the years. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, dominated broadcast TV in the U.S. Although PBS and local channels…

A cultural phenomenon in the 1980s, Fame, the Alan Parker directed film from 1980, and Fame, the subsequent TV series that ran from 1982 to 1987, have been given new DVD releases to coincide with the release of the new film version of Fame. The original film was nominated for six Oscars and won two.…

Noble, self-sacrificing schoolteachers have been a movie staple in films for decades. In the 1930s we had Goodbye, Mr. Chips; in the 1940s, Cheers for Miss Bishop; in the 1950s, Blackboard Jungle and Good Morning, Miss Dove! and in the 1960s, To Sir, With Love. While two major films of the late 1960s, Rachel, Rachel…

Criterion has made a lot of classic film lovers happy with the release of That Hamilton Woman, Alexander Korda’s sumptuous 1941 film about the scandalous adulterous love affair of Britain’s Napoleonic War hero, Lord Horatio Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton. A favorite of many, Winston Churchill claimed to have seen the film more than eighty…

Tony Gilroy has been a busy man this year. He not only wrote and directed Duplicity (reviewed here last week) but co-wrote this week’s top DVD release, State of Play, as well. Kevin Macdonald’s film version of the 2003 British TV miniseries of the same name crosses the Atlantic, moving the location of the original…

I’m of two minds about Duplicity, the new crime thriller from Tony Gilroy, the long time screenwriter who won writing and directing Oscar nominations for his directorial debut Michael Clayton. On the one hand, it’s nice to have smart, witty dialogue delivered in high style by a cast of gifted actors. On the other hand,…

For years now, Hollywood comedies have either had to be raunchy or sentimental or both to sell. The latest case in point is the March hit, I Love You, Man which walks a fine line between the two elements. Written by John Hamburg and Larry Levin and directed by Hamburg, the film starts with the…

While DVD companies continue to rush recent releases into the marketplace, classic films become harder and harder to find. While we get a few crumbs here and there – the recent screwball comedy sets, the hits and misses form the Warner archives – there are still way too many classics languishing unreleased on commercial DVD…

Expectations ran high for The Soloist throughout 2008. Then the film was pulled by Paramount at the last minute and bumped to an April 2009 release date giving the impression there was something wrong with the film. There isn’t. What’s wrong is the proliferation of Oscar prognosticators on the internet who build up expectations for…