Category: Home Viewing with Peter

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…

Married people slept in separate beds and only the wicked had sex outside of marriage in old Hollywood, right? Wrong! There was plenty sex both inside and outside of marriage on screen before the Production Code came into full force in mid-1934, and good and bad people getting away with murder as well. Having hit…

Lots of people seem to have trouble with the ending of No Country for Old Men, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor. I don’t get what they don’t get. The dreams that Tommy Lee Jones reveals to his wife, Tess Harper, at the end of the film may…

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t bestow many career achievement awards. When they do, they’re usually reserved for legendary stars like Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy, Deborah Kerr and Peter O’Toole or directors like Howard Hawks, King Vidor, Blake Edwards and Sidney Lumet who might otherwise not have an…

I had hoped to review Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There and Warner Bros. Fordibben Hollywood, Vol. 2 this week, but I’ve been told their DVD releases scheduled for today have been postponed, the former to May 6, the latter to March 25. No matter, there are still lots of other new releases to keep us…

Every year we thrill at certain Oscar winners, scoff at others. Here are a few thoughts on some winners for which the thrill remains. Six Best Picture Winners In only its third year in 1930, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave its award to what is still one of the great films…

Just in time for this Sunday’s presentation of the 80th Annual Academy Awards, DVD companies have released some of the year’s major contenders. They include Michael Clayton,nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress and Original Screenplay; In the Valley of Elah nominated for Best Actor; Elizabeth: The Golden Age, nominated for Best…

Jane Austen (1775-1817) is an author whose time has come again. Since the 1990s, films and handsome TV productions of her handful of novels published between 1810 and 1818, have been made, remade and reinterpreted numerous times. Where once only Pride and Prejudice was widely known as a cinematic work, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park,…

A long, but ultimately rewarding film, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is informed by its gorgeous cinematography by ace Roger Deakins and the score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Hailed as a revisionist take on a time-tested story, the film really doesn’t add much to the legend…