Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Paramount has finally given us a U.S. Blu-ray release of Lasse Hallstrom’s 1993 film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Swedish writer-director Hallstrom scored two 1987 Oscar nominations for writing and directing My Life as a Dog, a rarity for a foreign film director. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape was only his second Hollywood film.…

New This Week Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat has had an unusual history. Released between the director’s two most critically acclaimed films, 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans and 1999’s The Insider, the film met with mixed reviews upon its initial release but later became a huge hit with younger critics. Mann, who honed his…

New This Week 1955’s The Killing was the third classic heist film of the 1950s following John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and Jules Dassin’s Rififi, but it was a first in many ways. It was the first film version of a novel by Lionel White (The Night of the Following Day) and the first to…

New This Week Criterion has released a picture-perfect Blu-ray edition of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. That Hamaguchi’s masterful creation would win every critics group award for Best Foreign Language or International Film of 2021 was never in dispute. That it would win the Best Film award from the three most prestigious U.S. critics’ groups,…

New This Week Imprint has released a Blu-ray of Richard Fleischer’s 1961 film Barabbas, a biblical epic about early Christians in the tradition of The Sign of the Cross, Quo Vadis, The Robe, Ben-Hur, King of Kings, and the yet to be seen The Greatest Story Ever Told, taken from the 1950 Nobel Prize-winning novel…

New This Week The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is an action-packed comedy co-written by Nicolas Cage superfans Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten, and directed by Gormican. It stars Cage as himself and Cage superfan Pedro Pascal as a Cage superfan who convinces the actor to co-write and produce a film that the two will…

New This Week Everything Everywhere All at Once was heavily promoted as an action-adventure film in which an aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an adventure where she alone can save the world. The film’s multi-universe plot gets her into all kinds of crazy situations. For me, however, it works better as a carefully…

New This Week Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is the kind of film that sneaks up on you and grabs hold when you’re not expecting it to. This is just the fifth film from the 48-year-old Norwegian director of Reprise, Oslo, August 31st, Louder Than Bombs, and Thelma. Although marketed as a…

New This Week Giant has been given an Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Bros. The 1956 film was the fourteenth film made from the works of author-playwright Edna Ferber. Ferber’s 1924 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel So Big was made into a film three times. The 1924 silent version with Colleen Moore is a lost…

New This Week Father Stu is an odd duck of a movie. Based on the true story of Stuart Long, a Golden Gloves champion boxer turned would-be actor turned priest, the film was the brainchild of star Mark Wahlberg who began working on the film in 2016 with writer-director David O. Russell who directed him…

New This Week Sony has released a 70th Anniversary Edition of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and a 65th Anniversary Edition of the director’s The Bridge on the River Kwai in Ultra 4K UHD Steelbook editions of the films. These are, however, not restorations. They are reissues of previous 4K releases of the film, but…

New This Week Double Indemnity, 1776, and The Untouchables have all been newly released on 4K Ultra High-Definition discs. For those unfamiliar with the format, 4K UHD discs contain digital optical data storage that is an enhanced variant of the Blu-ray format. They are incompatible with non 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray players but 4K HD…

New This Week Flower Drum Song is the last of the filmed versions of a Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway musical to be released on Blu-ray. Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, as well as two versions of the made directly for the screen State Fair had been previously…

New This Week Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is a film that it took two viewings for me to appreciate. Initially, I dismissed it as an improbable take on California teenagers in 1973, but on second viewing found the breezy relationship between 15-year-old actor-turned-entrepreneur Cooper Hoffman and 25-year-old Alana Haim, his former babysitter, now his…

New This Week Uncharted was originally planned several years ago as a David O. Russell film with Mark Wahlberg, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci starring in the film version of the popular video game. By the time it finally got made, Russell, De Niro, and Pesci had dropped out and Wahlberg was reassigned to…