Category: Home Viewing with Peter

With so many of this year’s films coming up short, it’s nice to find one that exceeds expectations. Such is the case with Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s The Miracle Club which stars Laura Linney, Kathy Bates, and Maggie Smith all doing their best big screen work in years. It’s out now on Blu-ray and standard DVD. O’Sullivan,…

The only Alfred Hitchcock films that have been released so far in 4K UHD have come from Universal which owns fourteen of his films. Universal has now released Volume 3 of The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection in the format. Featured in this concluding set are 1948’s Rope, 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1966’s…

It’s Halloween, time for a ghost story. The Criterion Collection obliges with a first-rate 4K UHD upgrade of Alejandro Amenabar’s 2001 horror classic, The Others. Reminiscent of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents of forty years earlier, based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, as well as Robert Wise’s 1963 version of Shirley Jackson’s The…

Less than two months after its U.S. theatrical release, three months after its Israeli release, Golda has been released on Blu-ray and standard DVD. I wish I could say that this film about Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier during 1973’s Yum Kippur War is something to shout about, but unfortunately it isn’t. The film, which…

Streaming pioneers Amazon Prime and Netflix have begun to roll out their fall releases. Now streaming on Amazon Prime is The Burial starring Oscar winners Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones. Set in the mid-1990s, this comedy-drama is based on the true story of a funeral director’s suit against a conglomerate for breach of contract…

1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has been given a 4K UHD upgrade by Disney. As the first full-length cel-animated feature in motion picture history, as well as the most successful, it was expected to be the first Disney film to be released in the higher resolution format, but Disney for whatever reason gave…

Kino Lorber has released both 1964’s The Train and 1974’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot on 4K UHD, while Criterion has released 1973’s Don’t Look Now in the format. The Train was conceived by recent Oscar nominee Arthur Penn to be his follow-up to his Oscar-nominated The Miracle Worker. He directed the first day’s filming but was…

Horror films are always popular, but no more so than in the lead-up to Halloween at the end of October. Warner Bros. Home Video has gotten a jump on this year’s batch of horror film releases with its 4K UHD upgrade of William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty’s 1973 masterpiece, The Exorcist, in both its…

At this point, most of the year’s major Oscar contenders have either been released or seen by audiences and critics at film festivals around the world. The one glaring omission is the highly anticipated adaptation of the Broadway musical version of The Color Purple, which has prognosticators wondering if it will be a hit, a…

Kino Lorber has released a 4K UHD upgrade of 1975’s Three Days of the Condor. This still exciting thriller was one of the best of the cycle of conspiracy films that Hollywood produced between 1971’s Klute and 1981 ‘s Blow Out. That memorable cycle also includes Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, All the President’s…

Universal has released a 4K UHD upgrade of 2020’s Promising Young Woman. Nominated for five Oscars and winner of one for Emerald Fennell’s screenplay, this release comes as Fennell’s second directorial film, Saltburn, and star Carey Mulligan’s latest, Maestro, are making their film festival debuts to strong reviews. Fennell, previously best known for her acting…

Kino Lorber has released a newly 4K-mastered Blu-ray of Louis Malle’s controversial 1978 film, Pretty Baby. Based on the real-life happenings at New Orleans’ infamous red-light district, Storyville, which existed from 1897 until it was forcibly closed by the U.S. Navy in 1917, and the famed photographs of E.J. Bellocq (1873-1949), the film stars Brooke…

Now streaming on Netflix, The Pope’s Exorcist is one of the few recent theatrical releases that I was looking forward to seeing. While I spend most of my streaming time on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Max, Peacock, and Hulu binging on TV shows I’ve missed, I look forward to seeing the occasional film as well. Unfortunately,…

Two 1985 films from Oscar winning directors have been given 4K UHD plus Blu-ray releases. Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, long available only on an old bare bones Warner Bros. DVD, makes both its 4K UHD and Blu-ray debut from the Criterion Collection. This dark comedy follows a computer operator (Griffin Dunne) from New York’s upper…

Warner Brothers may have stepped up production of its library of classic Warner, RKO, and MGM films on Blu-ray through the Warner Archive but upgrades to 4K Ultra HD of its major productions, which are handled by Warner Home Video, are still few and far between. This month there are two – 1955’s East of…