Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

It’s been well over a decade since director Henry Selick enthralled audiences with The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. He’s back stronger than ever with his most ambitious project to date: Coraline. Coraline is a 3-D stop-motion animated film about a young girl who crawls through a secret door in her…

When motion picture exhibitors first started tracking the box office draw of movie stars in 1930, the first performer to be crowned No. 1 was not one of Hollywood’s powerful leading men or glamorous leading ladies, but a dowdy old lady with the face of a bulldog, an unlikely has-been with enormous talent and a…

It hardly seems like it’s been 35 years since Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno was released. The sparkling look of the film on Blu-ray makes it look like it finished filming yesterday. Only the aged visages of some of the actors in the accompanying documentaries draw attention to the passage of time, and all nine…

Director James Gray has only made four films thus far, but each one of them has been distinct and interesting. His first, 1994’s Little Odessa dealt with crime and punishment among Russian immigrants in Brooklyn and was beautifully acted by Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Maximilian Schell and Vanessa Redgrave. His next, 2000’s The Yards dealt…

Mae West asked if he was carrying a gun in his pocket or if he was just glad to see her, and a star was born. Audiences have been glad to see him ever since. I’m speaking of course of Cary Grant, whose entire screen career can be traced through the magic of DVD. The…

It won the National Board of Review award for Best Film of 2008 and numerous international film awards and was an early Oscar favorite for the triple crown of Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film. Alas, Ari Folman’s Israeli film Waltz With Bashir ended up being nominated only in the latter category,…

No less than three of 1959’s Best Picture Oscar nominees were about the indomitability of the human spirit. Two of them, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur and Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story, won the lion’s share of the year’s awards, yet it is the third, George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank, that has increased in reputation…