Category: Home Viewing with Peter

The legion of fans of the much admired actress can rejoice now that Warner Bros. has finally released some of her most requested films in its Natalie Wood Collection. Two of the titles in the set, Splendor in the Grass and Gypsy ,have been re-mastered for better picture and sound quality over their previous releases…

Lots to cover this week with the release of one major film from 2008 and fourteen older films, all but one of which are new to DVD. If you’re a Woody Allen fanatic you’ll love his latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. If not you’ll find little to like in it. The title doesn’t refer to…

The big release of the week is the Criterion Collection’s long awaited release of Douglas Sirk’s 1954 film Magnificent Obsession. John M. Stahl’s original 1935 version is included on a bonus disc. The original novel was written by Lloyd C. Douglas, whose religious-themed The Robe was a huge box office hit in 1953, prompting new…

There are lots of new and recent DVDs to catch up with this week. Sony/Columbia is one of the stingier companies when it comes to releasing classic films so it’s a cause for celebration when they come up with something for us like The Films of Michael Powell even if the collection contains only two…

It’s time to look back at the best DVD releases of 2008, which I cite as follows: Murnau, Borzage and Fox How the West Was Won (Blu-ray) Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration (Blu-ray) Fanny The Third Man (Blu-ray) Quo Vadis Becket (Blu-ray) The Lubitsch Musicals Persepolis (Blu-ray) The big news of…

Every year, DVD distributors make a dent in the long list of films not available on commercial DVD in the U.S., but it’s a slow process. This year they finally gave us Fanny and early next year they’ll give us Rachel, Rachel. We should be grateful for those, but there is so much more out…

Ho, Ho, Ho! It’s that time of year again. If it’s worth saying, it’s worth repeating. From November of 2007, here once again are a few of my favorite Christmas films. Though not a Christmas film in the strictest sense, so much of George Cukor’s sublime 1933 version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women takes…

The Fox in Fox’s massive new DVD box set, Murnau, Borzage and Fox, is not the studio but William Fox, the titular head of Fox Studios who was fast becoming the most powerful mogul in the business in the late 1920s. In 1926, Fox had already put into motion plans to catch up with industry…

Already the second highest grossing film of all time, Christopher Nolan’s new Batman film, The Dark Knight, is a meditation on the dichotomy of good and evil. Even before the untimely death of co-star Heath Ledger, this was the year’s most eagerly anticipated film. Ledger’s death gave it free but sad publicity and the knowledge…

The Oscars are 80 years old, soon to be 81. Hollywood’s annual self-indulgent ceremony of patting itself on the back began with the dawn of the sound film era and reached its halfway (to date) point in 1968 when movies and styles were changing. The Motion Picture Production Code which rigidly enforced certain rules since…

The animation in Pixar’s WALL-E is flawless. Even so, the film has the look and feel of a “real” movie rather than a cartoon. Very much in the mode of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film is about Earth’s last inhabitant, a garbage collecting robot, who comes to save the world.…

Who would have thought two guys drunkenly singing an old Barry Manilow song would provide the emotional high of a state-of-the-art superhero movie in 2008? Probably no one other than Guillermo del Toro who does just that with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the sequel to his 2004 Hellboy . Sequels rarely live up to…

The holidays have arrived with DVD releases of films for Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. For Veteran’s Day, Warner Bros. has come up with Warner Bros. and the Homefront featuring pristine versions of This Is the Army, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Hollywood Canteen. Officially titled Irvin Berlin’s This Is the Army, the 1942 musical…

Happy Election Day! Today is, of course, a historic one in which practically everyone will be glued to their TV sets, radios and/or internet sources for the results of many key races including the Presidency. There have been years, however, when Election Day news has either been slow in coming or downright dull and boring…

Marvel Comics, which also co-produced Iron Man, had a hand in the making ofthe latest incarnation of The Incredible Hulk. The comic strip character achieved its greatest success with the popular TV series that ran from 1978-1982 with Bill Bixby as the scientist exposed to a massive dose of gamma rays and Lou Ferrigno as…