Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week The Criterion Collection has released on Blu-ray a new 4K restoration of Samuel Fuller’s 1953 classic, Pickup on South Street. A consummate film noir, this black-and-white masterpiece, which clocks in at a lean, action-packed 80 minutes, has never looked better. Fuller was a legendary newspaper man before he became a film writer…

New This Week Paramount has been busy now that they have stepped up their Blu-ray release game between Paramount Presents, Paramount regular Blu-ray, and licensing to Australia’s Imprint and other outside companies. Finally making its Blu-ray debut, thanks to Paramount Presents, is Frank Perry’s 1981 film Mommie Dearest, a blockbuster in its day. The film…

New This Week Absurdly promoted as the “greatest production since the birth of motion pictures,” Ziegfeld Follies was the first box-office hit of 1946. Its shameless promotion seems especially ridiculous in a year which would give us such truly great films as The Best Years of Our Lives, It’s a Wonderful Life, Notorious, The Razor’s…

New This Week Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s penultimate film, There Was a Crooked Man…, had the misfortune of coming at the end of a cycle of astute, wryly observed modern gangster films and westerns. It was very much in the mode of Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit,…

New This Week Paramount Pictures was founded on May 8, 1912, making it the second oldest U.S. film studio still in existence. Universal, which was founded eight days earlier on April 30, 1912, is the oldest. Paramount won the first Oscar for Best Picture, 1927’s Wings, two years ahead of Universal’s first Oscar for 1930’s…

New This Week Doug Liman’s Chaos Walking was filmed in 2017 with reshoots taking place in 2019 and an eventual release in January 2021. Critics and audiences familiar with the series of novels it was based on were not kind. Not having read them, I found it a decent dystopian adventure, a genre I don’t…

New This Week Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung grew up on a small farm in rural Arkansas before attending Yale, where he majored in Ecology. Intent on Medical School, he turned to filmmaking instead in his senior year. He studied film at the University of Utah, earning his MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in 2004. His…

New This Week The Mauritanian first captured year-end 2020 awards attention with nominations for Best Film, Director (Kevin Macdonald), and Actor (Tahar Rahim) from the London Film Critics Circle. Both Rahim and Jodie Foster were nominated for Golden Globes for their performances. Foster even managed to pull off a surprise win, a feat she duplicated…

New This Week Judas and the Black Messiah was nominated for six Oscars and won two. It had been nominated for Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Song, and two Supporting Actors, Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield. Kaluuya won as expected, and H.E.R., D’Mile, and Tiara Thomas pulled off a surprise win for the song “Fight…

New This Week Nomadland is the first film since 12 Years a Slave to win the Satellite, Golden Globe – Drama, Critics Choice, BAFTA, Independent Spirit, and Oscar awards for Best Picture. The film version of Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book won just three Oscars but all three were historic ones. Chloé Zhao became the second…

New This Week Warner Archive has released Blu-ray upgrades of Annie Get Your Gun and Broadway Melody of 1940, two musicals of completely different styles from different eras that were only ten years apart. Before Show Boat, which opened on Broadway in late 1927, only operas and operettas had songs that flowed naturally from the…

New This Week Another Round is another masterpiece from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration, The Hunt) who has achieved the rare distinction of being nominated for a Best Directing Oscar for a film also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, or as it is now called, Best International Feature Film. Vinterberg, who also directed…

New This Week Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio was nominated for 15 David Di Donatello awards and won 5 in Italy’s version of the Oscars. It has since been nominated for various other awards including at Oscars for achievement in Costume Design and Hair and Makeup. While the original Italian version has been available for a while,…

New This Week Films about the afterlife have provided plenty of entertainment throughout film history. There have been too many to name them all, but for a sampling, check out 1941’sHere Comes Mr. Jordan, 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death, 1947’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, 1990’s Ghost, 1999’s…

New This Week News of the World was the only major studio release of 2020 considered to have had much of a chance at securing major Oscar nominations. In the end, it only received four for Cinematography, Production Design, Score, and Sound, all of them well earned. It had also been considered a possible nominee…