Category: Home Viewing with Peter

A high adrenaline thriller, Pete Travis’ Vantage Point moves so fast that you don’t have time to think, which is, I guess, the point. It’s like eating a meal with empty calories that only later do you realize you really didn’t have anything good to eat. The film concerns the attempted assassination of an American…

After a long dry spell we’ve finally gotten a wealth of good new films on DVD to choose from. Its title taken from the ancient capital of the Persian Empire, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis won numerous richly deserved awards including an Oscar nomination as Best Animated Feature of 2007. Taken from two autobiographical…

One of the most beloved films of all time, Joshua Logan’s Fanny, has finally been released on DVD. To commemorate the occasion, I’ll take a look at Fanny and other major films released in the U.S. in 1961 starting with the year’s top ten. It took two directors, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, to bring…

England’s Henry VIII and his immediate successors, Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey, Mary I and Elizabeth I have been the subjects of many films over the years. With the releases of TV’s The Tudors – The Complete First Season and the recent theatrical film, The Other Boleyn Girl, there are now more than twenty films…

Continuing my look at the films of previous years available or not on DVD, it’s time to look at 1960. The film year of 1960 holds special significance for me as it was the year in which I first worked in a movie theatre after school and, for the first time, saw almost all of…

With all the major movies from last year having been released on DVD, it’s time to catch up on the “little” films you may have missed, or lose yourself in the thrall of a beloved classic. The most ambitious film to be made from a Stephen King work in some years, Frank Darabont’s Stephen King’s…

We’ve previously taken a look back at the films of 1957 and 1958. This week, I’d like to take another stroll down memory lane and look at the films of 1959 starting with that year’s ten best, all of which are available on DVD. The year’s best film, certainly the most fun, was Billy Wilder’s…

Though genuine masterpieces from The Grapes of Wrath to Annie Hall to The Silence of the Lambs have been released in the month of January, Hollywood wisdom holds that this is the time to release films with low expectations while audiences are still catching up on the big year-end films. They are generally at best…

It’s a bountiful week for classic film releases. Warner Bros., Fox/MGM and Universal have all released films that have been in demand since the dawn of DVD eleven years ago. Ten years after his death, Warner Bros. pays tribute to Frank Sinatra with the release of four collections celebrating his lengthy career. Sinatra’s popularity as…

Short films have been a staple of the movies since the beginning. From the 1930s to the early 1960s, short films – both live action and animated, were part of the movie going experience for everyone. Though there were no specific rules about their exhibition, the shorter films, roughly those running ten minutes or less,…

One of last year’s best films, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was nominated for four Oscars and won numerous other awards. Julian Schnabel won the Best Director award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for the film based on the autobiography of Jean Dominique…

It’s Philip Seymour Hoffman week at the DVD store. The actor, who won an Oscar for Capote two years ago, starred in three of 2008’s major films, all newly released on DVD. Once you get over the sight of Hoffman in the altogether that opens Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, you discover that the…

I’m not clairvoyant. I don’t have a crystal ball. I have no way of knowing which films from any given year will stand the test of time. Yet every now and then the films that I love from a particular year turn out to be more popular over time than those that were more widely…

Nominated for eight Academy Awards and winner of two, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood was rightly last year’s most talked about film. The film version of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! deserved more than the measly two Oscars it won for Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of oil man Daniel Plainview and Robert Elswit’s rich…

With respectful, if rather lukewarm reviews, The Kite Runner got lost in the avalanche of year-end releases despite all its advance publicity. Telling the tale of an Americanized Afghanistan-born writer who returns to his homeland in search of the missing son of a friend, Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) has made his most assured…