Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Pain and Glory is Pedro Almodovar’s third film to be nominated for an Oscar for Best International Film (previously known as Best Foreign Language Film) following 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and 1999’s All About My Mother. Almodovar was himself nominated for his direction and screenplay of 2002’s…

New This Week Holiday was such a huge hit in 1930 that they remade it eight years later. Ironically, the much better 1938 version was a flop at the time, but has long since been considered one of the greatest sophisticated comedies of all time whereas the 1930 version has been all but forgotten. Based…

New This Week 1917 may well be on its way to becoming the fourth film about World War I to win an Oscar for Best Picture, following Wings (1927/28), All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Those films and few others about the war have even been nominated for Oscar’s…

New This Week The Peanut Butter Falcon, Wild Rose, and Luce are three under-the-radar films that have factored into year-end 2019 awards but are not considered major players in this year’s Oscar race. The Peanut Butter Falcon was among the Top Ten Independent Films of the Year singled out by the National Board of Review.…

New This Week Judy, newly released on Blu-ray and standard DVD, is a musical drama about the last days of the legendary Judy Garland, or to be precise, about her five-week run of concerts at London’s Talk of the Town (now the Hippodrome Casino) in early 1969, a few months before her death in June…

New This Week The Irishman, Marriage Story, and The Two Popes are among the most critically acclaimed films of 2019 but don’t look for them on home video any time soon. These three films, all of which have figured heavily into year-end awards consideration, were given limited theatrical showings in major cities and then mass…

New This Week Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s most accessible film ever. In an era in which there are supposedly no real movie stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are real movie stars. What’s more, DiCaprio plays one, albeit one of fifty years ago, with Pitt as his friend and stunt double…

New This Week The Goldfinch was one of the year’s most eagerly anticipated films until the critics got hold of it and audiences decided to give it a pass. The film version of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has its faults, but it is a film that deserves to be seen. The main criticisms of…

New This Week All About Eve and Now, Voyager, the two films containing Bette Davis’ greatest performances, have been given new 4K transfers for their Criterion Collection Blu-ray releases, both with tons of extras. All About Eve was the first film to receive 14 Oscar nominations, the most of any film through 1950. Its record…

New This Week Cold War was nominated for three 2018 Oscars, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Directing, and Best Cinematography, all of which it lost to Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, the first time two foreign language films had vied for these awards in the same year. Newly released on Blu-ray and DVD by Criterion, Cold War…

New This Week The Farewell was a breakout hit at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival from Asian-American director Lulu Wang that became a critical and box-office hit when it was released theatrically later in the year. Based on a story Wang has been telling since 2012, the semiautobiographical film is about a young Chinese-American woman…

New This Week Snow Falling on Cedars is a film worth discovering or rediscovering, whichever the case may be. The new 4K transfer and restoration by Shout Select was supervised by three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson (JFK, The Aviator, Hugo) who earned the fourth of his nine Oscar nominations so far for the film. Also…

New This Week The Return of Martin Guerre has been given a brand new 4K restoration by the Cohen Film Collection which reissued the film theatrically before its new Blu-ray release. The French film classic based on the real-life 15th Century case that resonated through Medieval Europe was released in France in late 1982. A…

New This Week Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg, newly upgraded to Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, features three of the Austrian-American director’s late silent films, 1927’s Underworld as well as 1928’s The Last Command and The Docks of New York. Underworld, which won Ben Hecht the first Oscar given for Best Original Story,…

New This Week The House of Hitchcock Collection, the newly released limited edition Blu-ray collection from Universal Home Video, is in essence a repackaging of Alfred Hitchcock: The Ultimate Collection first released in 2012, albeit with additional material including seven episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and three episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Hitchcock’s TV…