Category: Home Viewing with Peter
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Home Viewing with Peter #887
Arrow Video has released a 4K UHD remastered edition of Paul Schrader’s 1980 film, American Gigolo, the third film directed by the writer of Taxi Driver. Schrader’s previous two films, 1978’s Blue Collar and 1979’s Hardcore were well received by the critics but not by the public. Like Taxi Driver, which Schrader wrote for Martin…
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Home Viewing with Peter #886
Paramount Presents has released a stunningly beautiful 4K UHD restoration of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, the enduring 1974 masterpiece that is one of the screen’s great murder mysteries. Nominated for 11 Oscars, it won just one for Robert Towne’s brilliant screenplay. Jack Nicolson stars in perhaps his greatest performance as the private detective who is convinced…
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Home Viewing with Peter #885
I usually know what to expect from a film before I see it. I’m rarely surprised to see one that is so much better than I expected, but such was the case with Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One which won the 2023 Oscar for Best Visual Effects. The visual effects are impressive but the film,…
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Home Viewing with Peter #884
Kino Lorber has released three films on Blu-ray originally released theatrically between 1947 and 1974 that seemingly have nothing in common other than that they all deal with death. Raoul Walsh’s 1947 film, Pursued was the first noir western. Based on a novel by Niven Busch (Duel in the Sun, The Furies), the film is…
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Home Viewing with Peter #883
Kino Lorber has released a three-film Blu-ray of Paramount’s historically significant Philo Vance Collection, the first of the three being the first murder mystery of the talkie era. There were twelve Philo Vance detective novels written by author William Huntington Wright under the pseudonym of S.S. Van Dine published between 1926 and 1939 when the…
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Home Viewing with Peter #882
Sony has released a Blu-ray of Frank Borzage’s newly restored 1933 film, Man’s Castle. Sony, which owns the Columbia Pictures catalogue, recently found the missing footage needed to restore the film to its original 75-minute length after it was cut to 66 minutes for its 1938 post-Code release. The restored film was shown for the…
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Home Viewing with Peter #881
The year’s biggest box-office success thus far has been Dune: Part Two which has been released on Blu-ray and 4K Ultra UHD by Warner Home Video. The film, a sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film, Dune, is basically the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel. This is at least the third iteration of the…
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Home Viewing with Peter #880
The 1952 classic High Noon has been released on home video so many times in so many formats that it’s astonishing that it has taken this long to be upgraded to 4K UHD but that has finally happened thanks to Kino Lorer’s release of the film now owned by Paramount. The Stanley Kramer production was…
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Home Viewing with Peter #879
This week’s top Blu-ray upgrades are a diverse group of films stretching from the early 1990s all the way back to the mid-1940s, but they have one thing in common: change. 1991’s Dogfight gives us the premier sensitive boy actor of his generation, River Phoenix, as a cruel, foulmouthed marine whose sensitive side is a…
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Home Viewing with Peter #878
Studios and other rights holders continue to be stingy with new video releases. You must either see new films in theatres or streaming on your TV. Blu-ray and increasingly 4K UHD Blu-ray upgrades of films previously released on DVD make up the bulk of home video releases now. Among the new 4K UHD releases, all…
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Home Viewing with Peter #877
With the 2024 Tony nominations just a week away, now is the perfect time to catch up with or watch again some of the previous Tony award-winning performances that were later captured on film. Tonys were first presented in 1947 for shows that opened on Broadway in the 1946-1947 season. Ingrid Bergman, a Best Actress…
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Home Viewing with Peter #876
With streaming programs in full force across various platforms, there’s no excuse not to view something at home now, whether it be through one of the services or from the reserves of your DVD and Blu-ray collections. Here are a few examples of the remarkable films and TV series and miniseries that are streaming right…
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Home Viewing with Peter #875
There are lots of series and mini-series to watch on streaming, but not too many recent or new theatrical films worth delving into. The dwindling Blu-ray and DVD releases of the last week or so are a mixed bag as well. Best of the lot is Gregory Hoblit’s 1996 film Primal Fear, given a 4K…
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Home Viewing with Peter #874
Warner Archive has released a Blu-ray of the long in demand 1948 version of Peter B. Kyne’s 1916 novel 3 Godfathers. John Ford’s film was the 8th of 9 films to date made from the 1913 novel of the same name. The first two versions, released in 1913 and 1916, respectively, starred silent screen great…
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Home Viewing with Peter #873
Imprint has released a Blu-ray upgrade of Bob Rafelson’s 1990 film Mountains of the Moon, based on the historical biographical “Burton and Speke” novel by William Harrison, as well as the original journals of the 19th century explorers John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton. It was only the second film from prolific writer-producer-director Rafelson that…