Pelle the Conqueror, the 1988 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language film, has been given a magnificent 30th anniversary restoration. The new Blu-ray and DVD from Film Movement features a superb narration by film historian and scholar Peter Cowie. Cowie’s narration fills in the blanks that puts into perspective for modern audiences the harsh realities of the time and place in which this Danish masterpiece is set.

Taken from the first volume of a four-part novel published between 1906 and 1910, the Dickensian work by Danish writer Martin Anderson Nexo is about a Swedish boy who emigrates to Denmark with his father after the death of his mother. Unable to find work because he is too old, and the boy too young, the father finds work on a remote farm on which both he and his son attend the farm’s dairy cows and he and his son sleep in a room in the cow shed.

Directed by Bille August, the film stars Pelle Hvenegaard as the boy, Pelle, and Oscar-nominated Max von Sydow as his father, Lasse. The novel takes place over a ten-year period in which the boy ages from 8 to 18, but the passage of time is not specified in the film in which 11-year-old Hvenegaard plays the title character throughout. Selected from over 3,000 candidates for the part, Hvenegaard was named by his mother after the character in the beloved novel, which is part of the curriculum in Danish schools. He does the part full justice, as does the entire cast, led by the incomparable von Sydow as the well-intentioned, but weak father.

Von Sydow had been acting in films since 1949, an international star beginning with the success of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 classic The Seventh Seal. He achieved his greatest acclaim with Jan Troell’s two-part immigration epic, 1971’s The Emigrants and 1972’s The New Land in which his character, along with other family members, leaves a destitute life behind in search for one of promise in another country, only to find more anguish. Pelle the Conqueror, the nickname he gives his son, and von Sydow’s Lasse, leave their home in Sweden for opportunities in Denmark that don’t really exist.

Told mostly through the young boy’s eyes, the story which takes place in the late 19th century, has many parallels to the first parts of Dickens’ David Copperfield and Great Expectations. It’s a world in which the boy’s only real friend, the illegitimate son of the farm’s owner, runs away to become a freak in a side show; one in which a farm girl gives birth to an illegitimate baby who is drowned by the father leading to the mother’s hanging; and one in which the boy’s mentor, a man with dreams of escaping this harsh world for a new one, is rendered senseless by an accidental blow to his head and sent away to an asylum from which he will never return.

It’s also a world in which his ne’er-do-well father finally has a chance at real happiness with a local widow until it turns out she’s not widowed at all when her husband returns from the sea.

That it took so long for the Academy to nominate von Sydow, who by this point had already received Golden Globe nods for Hawaii and The Exorcist, was absurd, but the international community had generally ignored him as well. He actually received more recognition with his largely silent performance in 2011’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close for which the now 88-year-old actor received his second Oscar nomination along with many other nominations and awards. He is, without doubt, the greatest living actor never to have won an Oscar, a discrepancy which can probably only be remedied now by bestowing upon him a long overdue career achievement award.

Met with great acclaim upon its release in 2001, Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World was taken from David Clowe’s comic book of the same name. It was Zwigoff’s first film since the 1994 documentary Crumb and the first film for Clowe, with both sharing the film’s Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. They later collaborated on 2006’s Art School Confidential. Zwigoff, in the interim, also directed 2003’s Bad Santa, but has not directed any other film to date.

The Criterion Collection has nicely packaged Ghost World in a sparkling new Blu-ray release, but the bloom is off much of the film. The once refreshing comedy now seems excessively vulgar and the misguided and pretentious teacher, played by Illeana Douglas, seems way over the top, more like a Saturday Night Live parody than a real person. On the other hand, time has been truly kind to the heartfelt performances of Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, and especially Steve Buscemi as the needy nerds. Why Buscemi wasn’t even nominated for an award he should have won, remains one of the great mysteries of the last two decades of Oscar history.

Birch, Johansson, and Douglas are featured in a new on-camera interview.

One of the most inspiring films of recent years, Doug Atchison’s 2007 film Akeelah and the Bee has been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Lionsgate.

The film, which made a star of 13-year-old Keke Palmer, is about a shy, barely noticed 11-year-old African-American girl who unexpectedly wins her school’s spelling bee and goes on to national recognition with the help of a dedicated teacher played by Laurence Fishburne. Angela Bassett co-stars as the girl’s mother. Much like the recent Disney film Queen of Katwe, about a Ugandan girl who rises from humble beginnings to became a chess champion, this is a film that speaks to the heart as well as the mind, and has audiences cheering as its young heroine accomplishes the seemingly impossible.

Still the greatest and funniest film about the Cold War, Billy Wilder’s 1961 classic One, Two, Three has been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Kino Lorber. James Cagney, Host Buchholz, Arlene Francis, Pamela Tiffin, Lilo Pulver, and company are more fabulous than ever in this high definition release of one of the most enduring films of its era.

Kino Lorber has also given us a Blu-ray upgrade of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1947 film The Paradine Case. Sadly, this is not one of the master of suspense’s great films. Hitch’s last film under his contract with David O. Selznick is a rather shoddily edited film that suffered from the megalomaniacal producer’s interference. Opening the film on December 30, 1947 in just two Los Angeles theatres to qualify for the 1947 Academy Awards, Selznick was still cutting the film leading up to its New York opening in January 8, 1948, which included cutting out Ethel Barrymore’s key scene, the one that earned her the film’s only Oscar nomination. The cuts were made to Barrymore, Alida Valli, and Joan Tetzel’s scenes to prop up Ann Todd’s part as Gregory Peck’s faithful wife. Barrymore as hanging judge Charles Laugthon’s wife, Valli as the accused murderer being defended by lawyer Peck, and Tetzel as Peck’s partner Charles Coburn’s daughter were deemed expendable by Selznick. This, despite the big buildup given to Valli and Louis Jourdan, also making his Hollywood debut, as her valet and secret lover.

If audiences of the day thought Valli was a poor substitute for Ingrid Bergman, fine, but Todd was no Deborah Kerr, either. With stars like Bergman and Kerr in place of Valli and Todd, and a non-interfering producer, Hitchcock may have made one of his better films, but the director who famously clashed with Selznick on Rebecca and Spellbound just wanted to end his seven-year contract with him and kept silent as the producer all but destroyed the film. Still, it is a Hitchcock film, and there are things worth noting, including Lee Garmes’ striking cinematography and the performances of Laughton, Coburn, and what remains of Barrymore’s.

This week’s new releases include the Blu-ray debuts of The Man in the Glass Booth and Ugetsu.