Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

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…