Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

One hundred and twenty hours of film were recorded and eight hours of it were put on screen in the final product through its multiple screen images in the “you-are-there” documentary, Woodstock. Woodstockthe film was as remarkable an achievement as the three day celebration of music, love and mud it documents. Michael Wadleigh’s box office…

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet reunite eleven years after Titanic. No crowd pleaser this time out, Revolutionary Road is a bleak melodrama about discontented suburbanites in the 1950s. Richard Yates’ novel met with critical acclaim when it was published in 1961, but was not a commercial success. Indeed, none of the writer’s seven published novels…

Paramount has released three more films in its Centennial Collection. As with previous releases, these are re-mastered editions of previously released DVDs with tons of extras. Initial reviews of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in May 1962, ranged from respectful to indifferent. It wasn’t until the 1970s when Ford was dead and…

A huge hit early in the year, Pierre Morel’s Taken is a French film done in English with Liam Neeson as the U.S. government agent whose daughter (Maggie Grace) is kidnapped by slave traders while on vacation in Paris. The film is completely implausible from beginning to end. Neeson single-handedly kills so many bad guys…

Several long requested classic films are now available on DVD. Dalton Trumbo wrote his acclaimed anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, about a victim of World War I – the war to end all wars – in 1938. It was published on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. It won a National…

Now that all the films that make up my 2008 ten best list have been released on Region 1 DVDs, it’s a good time to take another look at those films. It used to be that films made from proven works, major novels and play, and films from A-list directors and stars, were highly anticipated…

One of last year’s best films, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, based on his Pulitzer Prize and Tony award-winning play, has come home to Blu-ray and standard DVD. Shanley’s film, like his play, is set in 1964. The Catholic Church is on the cusp of great change. Vatican II with its sweeping mandates has already occurred…

Warner Bros. had already decided to release Slumdog Millionaire straight to DVD in the U.S. when Fox Searchlight picked up the distribution rights last fall and released the film to U.S. theatres instead. The result was a word-of-mouth hit and an eventual worldwide awards winner. Among its haul of awards – 8 Oscars out of…