Category: Home Viewing with Peter

A box office hit, though not quite the success its producers had hoped, Paramount has released Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Blu-Ray and standard DVD. The fourth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise comes nineteen years after the last one, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,and finds star Harrison Ford…

Disney has entered the Blu-ray market with the re-release of its 1959 animated Sleeping Beauty. The disc looks terrific, the colors sharper than the previous standard DVD release of five years ago, but the film itself has always struck me as a bit lackluster when compared to the glorious work of such earlier efforts as…

Some of the major films released earlier in the year are now making their way to Blu-ray and standard DVD. Character actor Richard Jenkins has the role of his career in one of the year’s best films, Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor, now available in both formats. Much like McCarthy’s earlier The Station Agent, it’s one…

Since the introduction of the high-end of high definition, now the exclusive purview of Blu-ray, we have seen films that already looked and sounded great on standard DVD look even better in the new format. Now, we are seeing films that were in dire need of restoration being restored for release in the new format…

Criterion continues to release near-perfect restorations of classic films. Three new releases add handsomely to their reputation. Director Michael Powell in seeing The Small Back Room at a Lincoln Center retrospective in 1991 found the then-more-than-forty-year-old film to be a cold movie. Although the film was well received by the British critics in 1949 (it…

“A classic movie adventure – breathtakingly reborn via pioneering technology – in 2 stunning new versions never before possible” is the blurb on the Blu-ray packaging of How the West Was Won and for once the hyperbole is accurate. The two-disc set features both the widescreen version transfer tailored to home screens which is also…

Another week and still no truly outstanding new films on DVD, but there are some that will at least keep you entertained in the waning days of summer. Keanu Reeves is at his stoic best in action director David Ayer’s Street Kings. Though Reeves’ delivery can sometimes be construed as sleepwalking, his cool reserve here…

With the pickings remaining slim in DVD releases of exciting new movies, one would think this would be the ideal time for DVD distributors to fill the gap with releases of from their extensive catalogues of classic films. Alas, that isn’t the case, but there are a few gems being released here and there. This…

The best new movie on DVD is the HBO film Jay Roach’s Recount about the 2000 battle over Florida’s election results between Bush’s thugs and Gore’s wimps. No less than five of its actors are up for Emmys: Kevin Spacey as Gore recount point man Ron Klain; Tom Wilkinson as Republican string-puller James Baker; Bob…

I’m going to interrupt my chronological coverage of the film years that began with 1957 that has so far gone through 1962 to go back even further in time to talk about the film year 1940. While most film buffs and historians consider 1939 to be the best in Hollywood history, I think 1940 was…

These are the dog days of summer as far as DVD releases are concerned. Having exhausted their release schedule of last year’s big screen hits and saving up this year’s for holiday season shopping, DVD distributers have little to offer anyone looking for new and worthwhile theatrical films to rent or buy. I guess they…

It’s time for another in my series of “Films By Year” and their availability on DVD. While my articles on the years from 1957 through 1961 focused on films released in the U.S. in those years, I’m doing a bit of shift in focus starting with 1962 and going with the first year of theatrical…

Peter Luketic’s 21 starts out well on the campus of Boston’s M.I.T. where poor boy Jim Sturgess falls under the influence of evil professor Kevin Spacey who teaches him to count cards, a trick he will need to win the money he needs for his tuition at Harvard Medical School. Once the film gets to…

Two years ago the hi-definition format wars began between the Sony-backed Blu-ray and the Toshiba-backed HD-DVD. The war has ended and Sony won. The question now is will Blu-ray become as popular as standard definition DVD or remain a niche market the way the laser disc was for upscale buyers who wanted something better than…

An indifferent public kept one of this year’s few good films so far from becoming the success it deserved. Kimberly Peirce’s meticulously researched Stop-Loss instead became the latest in a series of films about the Iraq War to suffer defeat at the box office. The policy of stop-loss was created by the United States Congress…