‘Pelle the Conqueror’

Bille August’s adaptation of Martin Anderson Nexo’s semiautobiographical novel, a landmark of Danish literature, follows the painful boyhood of a Swedish immigrant boy and his elderly, exhausted but loving father (a magnificent performance by Max Von Sydow, pictured right, with Pelle Hvenegaard). August and his brilliant cinematographer, Jorgen Persson, make this an epic of landscape and seasons, focussing on Pelle and his father, peasants on a farm; an 1988 Oscar winner for best foreign film (Cinemax, Tuesday at noon).