Milos Forman’s 1981 film of E.L. Doctorow’s kaleidoscopic 1975 novel Ragtime has been given a stunning 4K transfer by Paramount for its 40th anniversary Blu-ray release.

Nominated for 8 Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actor Howard E. Rollins (A Soldier’s Story) and Best Supporting Actress Elizabeth McGovern (Ordinary People), the film was not nominated for Best Picture or Director for the two-time Oscar winner (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus(NOTE: honored after this film’s release)). It did, however, earn a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Michael Weller, who had previously collaborated with Forman on his 1979 film version of Hair.

Weller’s screenplay, though expertly written, was a huge problem for Doctorow’s legion of readers in that the book’s strong mix of real and fictional characters was paired down to just a handful. The 1998 Tony award-winning musical did a much better job of inclusion.

The standout fictional characters in the novel were an immigrant Jewish father and a well-to-do suburban Protestant mother played in the film by Mandy Patinkin (Yentl) and Mary Steenburgen, fresh from her Oscar-winning performance in Melvin and Howard. The emphasis in the film is on fictional Coalhouse Walker, Jr., the black piano player caught up in the racial tensions of the day, and Evelyn Nesbitt, the central figure in a notorious turn of the 20th century murder trial, played by Oscar nominees Rollins and McGovern. Top-billed James Cagney in his first film since 1961’s One, Two, Three makes a brief early appearance as the NYC police commissioner, but does not figure into the narrative until the one hour and forty-five minute mark.

40 years on, none of that matters. In an age when such epic films have become exceedingly rare, the film’s meticulous Oscar-nominated cinematography, art direction, costume design, and score by Randy Newman stand out even more. The Blu-ray release also contains an unreleased director’s cut with deleted scenes inserted in black-and-white to distinguish them from the film’s rich color palette.

Shout! Factory has released on Blu-ray 1993’s M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg’s film of David Henry Hwang’s Tony-award winning play based on the true story of a French diplomat who had a years-long affair in the 1960s with a Chinese spy he believed to be a woman, not a man in drag. The director of such horror classics as The Dead Zone and The Fly would seem an odd choice for the material but he brings it off admirably. Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons (Reversal of Fortune) plays the diplomat, and John Lone (The Last Emperor) plays the spy in what is for most of the film, a two-character study. They are both excellent.

The film suffered at the time of its release by comparison to the similarly themed The Crying Game and Farewell, My Concubine, but in retrospect is equally fine.

I am a big fan of Vincente Minnelli’s work from 1944’s Meet Me in St. Louis through 1960’s Home from the Hill, but one Minnelli film I have never liked is 1958’s Some Came Running, newly given a Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Archive.

The film from the novel by James Jones (From Here to Eternity) stars Frank Sinatra as a homecoming G.I., Dean Martin as his best friend, and Shirley MacLaine in an Oscar-nominated performance as a girl they both under-appreciate. Sinatra is quietly effective, but Martin is annoying while MacLaine’s kewpie doll performance is a matter of taste. Better are the Oscar-nominated supporting performances of Arthur Kennedy as Sinatra’s brother and Martha Hyer as his schoolteacher girlfriend. Nancy Gates and Leora Dana also stand out in the large supporting cast.

The only thing more annoying than Martin’s performance is the garish cinematography that gives credence to the otherwise false criticism that Minnelli’s films were more style than substance.

Released the same year as Minnelli’s Gigi, which won nine Oscars including one for the director, it’s ironic that MacLaine, Kennedy, and Hyer were nominated for Oscars for this lesser film in lieu of the expected nominations of Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, and Hermione Gingold in the Best Picture winner.

Warner Archive has also released the popular 1944 film National Velvet on Blu-ray.

The film, starring 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor as the girl who loses England’s Grand National Sweepstakes on a technicality, but wins the hearts of the country, has been a staple of family films ever since. Adapted from the novel by Enid Bagnold (The Chalk Garden), it co-stars Mickey Rooney, Donald Crisp, and Anne Revere in her Oscar-winning role as Taylor’s mother.

New to Blu-ray from Kino Lorber are the memorable films noir The Accused, Among the Living, The Mad Doctor, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes.

Loretta Young, who received a 1949 Oscar nomination for Come to the Stable, gives an equally memorable performance in William Dieterle’s The Accused from the same year.

Young is pitch perfect as a psychology professor who attempts to hide the self-defense killing of rapist Douglas Dick. The superb supporting cast includes Robert Cummings, Wendell Corey, Sam Jaffee, and Sara Allgood.

Stuart Heisler’s 1941 film Among the Living gives us Albert Dekker in a dual role as the sane and mad sons of a recently deceased mill owner. Susan Hayward, Harry Carey, and Frances Farmer co-star.

Tim Whelan’s The Mad Doctor, also from 1941, gives us Basil Rathbone as a modern Bluebeard with Ellen Drew as his latest conquest, John Howard as an investigative reporter, and Frank Morgan as a small-town doctor who is on to him.

John Farrow’s 1948 film Night Has a Thousand Eyes gives us Edward G. Robinson as a clairvoyant, Gail Russell as woman in distress, and John Lund as the man who loves her.

This week’s new Blu-ray releases include Criterion’s 80th Anniversary edition of Citizen Kane and Warner Archive’s The Thin Man Goes Home, the fifth of six films in the series.