OSCAR season is upon us, and that means a deluge of dramas built around powerhouse performances, all hoping for a chance at a golden statue or two.

A top contender for “Best Foreign” in a few categories is I’m Still Here, a historical biopic of Eunice Paiva, a political activist whose husband was “disappeared” by the military dictatorship of Brazil in 1970.

This is based on a book written by their son, Marcello Rubens Paiva, and has been adapted by Walter Salles – a legend of global cinema.

The real buzz around this film has focused on the performance of Fernanda Torres in the lead role, who portrays both the despondency of unresolved grief and the growing steely determination to change a broken world into something better while still coming across as a believable and loving mother.

Not quite so lofty is the epic fantasy adventure In The Lost Lands.

A fusion of post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a Western vibe, and a sprinkling of vague magical powers, the film stars Milla Jovovich as a queen on a mystical quest, who hires Dave Bautista to help her navigate the dangers of the dark world.

Director Paul W.S. Anderson is Jovovich’s husband.

Their pairing has seen the Resident Evil film series become confoundingly successful.

Anderson is a master of modern B-grade movies, in that while stories are often undercooked, performances are over-the-top and he frequently prioritises style over substance, his films are almost always actually entertaining.

Small-scale indie dramas are often opportunities to pack several great performers into close quarters and be riveted by the results, and Aussie prison film Inside looks like it might manage exactly that.

Newcomer Vincent Miller stars as juvenile offender Mel who is being pressured by older inmate Warren (Guy Pearce) to kill his new cellmate, a notorious criminal played by Cosmo Jarvis.

Writer/director Charles Williams has crafted a tight narrative that explores the trap of the prison system, by which people who may want to transform their lives into something better are beset by what they must do to survive on the inside.

If you’re not too put off by sentimentality in your pictures, White Bird has enough to last the rest of the year.

Marketed as “a wonder story”, this film serves as a sequel to the 2017 film Wonder, about a boy born with a genetic facial deformity finding his place in a new school.

This film, however, uses the bully from that picture as the catalyst for a long-form flashback narrated by his grandmother (played by Helen Mirren) who is sharing her experiences of persecution as a Jew in WWII to convince him to be kinder to others, even when they are different.

Yes, I have just explained the whole film, but the trailer already does that.

Director Marc Foster is a skilled hand at exactly this kind of narrative so this will be the good kind of “movie with a message”.

Dahomey is a film from documentarian Mati Diop that blends fact with a sort of fictional narrative as 26 artefacts of the Kingdom of Dahomey (the West-African nation now known as Benin) are returned to their native lands after being displayed in a French museum.

The “fiction” is in the form of a narrative attributed to one of the statues being returned, commenting on the history of the land and the time spent “captive”.

Another glimpse into the turmoil of an oppressed nation, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is being marketed as a political drama, but actually skews more into being a thriller.

Iman (Missagh Zareh) has recently been appointed an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court of Iran, but discovers he is expected to rubber stamp sentences imposed by his superiors without regard for the truth.

Caught between his conscience, political uprising in the streets and threats of harm to his family, Iman grows in paranoia and begins to question the loyalties of everyone surrounding him, including his own wife and daughters.

Another charming little documentary, this time from Sweden, arrives in The Last Journey.

Filmmakers Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson are something like a Swedish Hamish and Andy, having built a joint career over 25 years as television hosts, presenters and quasi-journalists.

Sometime around 2023, Filip’s father Lars retired from a 40-year career teaching French, but soon fell into the melancholy and malaise that besets many in that stage of life.

In the hopes of “rekindling his spark” the duo decide to take him on a road trip to his beloved France, and figure that enough hijinks would ensue to justify the inclusion of a camera crew.

The result is indeed often hilarious, heartbreaking and beautiful in equal measure.

By Lindsay HALL