Author: Peter J Patrick
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Home Viewing with Peter #853
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…
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Oscar Profile: Arthur O’Connell
Born March 29, 1908 in New York, New York, to Irish immigrants, his father a hotel worker, his mother a housewife, Arthur O’Connell attended St. John’s High School and College in Brooklyn before making his stage debut in a 1929 production of The Patsy. A travelling vaudevillian for a time, he made his film debut…
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Home Viewing with Peter #852
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…
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Oscar Profile: Catherine Deneuve
Born October 22, 1943 in Paris, France to stage actors Maurice Dorléac (1901-1979) and Renée Simonet (1911-2021), Catherine Dorléac, known professionally as Catherine Deneuve, was the second of three acting sisters. Older sister Francoise Dorléac (1942-1967) was the bigger star until her tragic death in an automobile accident at the age of 25. Deneuve made…
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Home Viewing with Peter #851
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…
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Oscar Profile: Jennifer Connelly
Born December 12, 1970 in Cario, New York, Jennifer Connelly was the daughter of a clothing manufacturer and his wife. Her father was of Irish and Norwegian ancestry and her mother was from a Jewish immigrant family. Although born in the Catskills, Connelly grew up in Brooklyn Heights near the Brooklyn Bridge, right across from…
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Home Viewing with Peter #850
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…
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Oscar Profile: Joan Hackett
Born March 1, 1934 in New York, New York to an Italian mother and an Irish-American father, Joa Hackett was one of three children. A natural beauty, she left high school during the twelfth grade to become a model. On the cover of Harper’s Junior Bazaar in 1952, Hackett turned down an offer of a…
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Home Viewing with Peter #849
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…
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Oscar Profile: Oskar Werner
Born November 13, 1922 in Vienna, Austria, Oskar Josef Bschließmayer, known professionally as Oskar Werner, was brought up by his grandmother after the divorce of his parents at an early age. An uncle got him several uncredited roles in films as a teenager. Regaled by his grandmother’s stories about the Austrian State Theater, he made…
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Home Viewing with Peter #848
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…
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Oscar Profile: Angela Bassett
Born August 16, 1958 in New York, New York to a social worker and her husband, Angela Bassett was raised primarily by her mother in Florida after her divorce from her father when she was four. Having graduated from Yale with a B.A. in African-American Studies in 1980, Bassett studied acting at the Yale School…
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Home Viewing with Peter #847
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…
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Home Viewing with Peter #846
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…
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Oscar Profile: Carolyn Jones
Born April 28, 1930 in Amarillo, Texas to a barber and his wife, Carolyn (Sue) Jones, along with her younger sister and her mother, moved in with her maternal grandparents in their Amarillo home after her father abandoned the family in 1934. Unable to attend films due to her acute asthma, Jones became an avid…
