The 2015 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Laszlo Nemes’ Hungarian film Son of Saul, is a devastatingly grim account of two days in the life of a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who survives by working for the Nazis. His job is to calm new arrivals to the camp as they remove their clothes and enter the showers, with a promise of hot soup when they emerge. The showers are, of course, gas ovens and there will be no soup waiting for them. They will either die from the inhalation of the gas or like one teenage boy, survive against overwhelming odds and undergo an examination by a doctor who will squeeze his nose with one hand and hold the other one over his mouth until he stops breathing.

The protagonist Saul, played by the Hungarian poet Geza Rohrig, who had discovered the boy still breathing is now determined to find a rabbi to give him a proper burial instead of his just being dumped in the pit with the other dead prisoners whose bodies will be burned. When asked why he is so determined to risk everything for this one dead boy, he claims that the boy is his son. Saul, who is among the walking dead, knows that his own time will soon be up. The Nazis only allow their Jewish helpers a few weeks before they too must go to the showers. The film, like the events it depicts, is a living nightmare. It helps that the Blu-ray and DVD come with a descriptive narration by actress Adrienne Barbeau because you really need expert vision to see a lot of what she is describing.

It may not have been nominated for any Oscars, but Christian Petzold’s German film, Phoenix is an equally unforgettable account of the walking dead, in this case a Nazi camp survivor whose shattered face is reconstructed closely, but not exactly to its original composition. This allows Nelly (Nina Hoss) to play both herself and a woman pretending to be her so that her husband (Ronald Zeherfeld) can obtain access to the fortune she has inherited from her murdered family.

Phoenix plays out like an old-fashioned melodrama that Hollywood used to turn out by the dozens, but the film it most resembles is Andrew Haigh’s recently released 45 Years. Both films end in a revelation of sorts through the singing of a song. In 45 Years the song was Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes from Roberta. In Phoenix, it’s Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash’s “Speak Low” from One Touch of Venus sung in English to haunting effect by the sensational Nina Hoss.

This was Hoss’s sixth film for director Petzold. Their previous high water mark collaboration was 2012’s Barbara, but this film exceeds even that.

Hoss is becoming increasingly well known in the U.S. thanks to her performance in 2014’s A Most Wanted Man and her role in last season’s Berlin-set Homeland Season 4.

Son of Saul from Sony Classics and Phoenix from Criterion, both with loads of extras are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

If foreign films about the Holocaust are too heavy for you, fear not, there are new Blu-ray upgrades of some of Hollywood’s most popular comedies newly available as well.

The 1992 Oscar winner for Best Special Effects, Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her features Meryl Streep as a narcissistic movie star and Goldie Hawn as her plain Jane friend whose fiancé, Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Bruce Willis, she steals. Seven years later Hawn, now a glamorous author, seeks her revenge. Murder and mayhem ensue with Streep and Hawn on their way to Zombieland.

Isabella Rosselini and Sydney Pollack co-star. The Shout! Factory restored widescreen Blu-ray features an all-new making-of documentary as well as several extras imported from the old pan-and-scan Universal DVD.

Doris Day received her only Oscar nomination for 1959’s Pillow Talk given a Bu-ray upgrade by Universal four years ago. That film is now joined by her other two films with co-star Rock Hudson, 1962’s Lover Come Back and 1964’s Send Me No Flowers in the Doris Day and Rock Hudson Romantic Comedy Collection.

Nominated for five Academy Awards in all, Pillow Talk won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Three years later its near carbon copy, Lover Come Back, received just one Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Two years after that Send Me No Flowers received no nominations, although in actuality it is certainly more original than Lover Come Back. Hudson is a playboy masquerading as a nebbish in both Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back. In Send Me No Flowers he is an actual nebbish, a hypochondriac who overhears a telephone conversation between two doctors and jumps to the conclusion that it is his impending death they are talking about.

This kind of nonsense kept Day and Hudson at the top of the box office charts in the early 1960s without putting too much strain on either of their acting abilities.

Debbie Reynolds was 22 playing a 17-year-old and Dick Powell was 49 going on 50 playing a 35-year-old passing for 29 in Frank Tashlin’s 1954 comedy Susan Slept Here given its bare bones Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Archive.

The film, which is narrated tongue-in-cheek by an Oscar statuette, received two Oscar nominations of its own, for Best Sound and Best Original Song (the forgettable “Hold My Hand”).

Powell plays an Oscar winning writer who agrees to house delinquent Reynolds from Christmas Eve until the day after Christmas so she won’t have to spend the holiday in jail. Naturally they fall in love and will marry before she has to go to jail.

Anne Francis is Powell’s thrown-aside fiancé, Glenda Farrell his secretary, and Alvy Moore his gofer. Farrell, who was Powell’s contemporary, is the only character who comes close to being a believable human being.

This week’s new releases include Deadpool and Joy.