Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

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…