A little over a year after jailing and banning their most famous filmmaker from making movies, Iran might win an Academy Award for Best Picture. It would be a first for the nation whose government seems to strongly dislike creativity and freedom of speech, but its entry this year, A Separation, almost seems like a sure thing. Come February, writer/director Asghar Farhadi and Iran might be standing on the winner’s podium. But it’s not a done deal yet. A Separation and 8 other films were announced last week as part of the Oscar shortlist – just one step away from becoming an official nominee. They include a Danish comedy set in Argentina, a masculine drama about the underground world of illegal bovine growth hormones in Belgium, and something marvelous from Wim Wenders. It’s, to say the least, a varied group. Except that almost all of them are dramas from writer/directors.  So, yeah. Subject matter-wise though, it’s a full spectrum. The final 5 will be announced tomorrow morning, but here first are the trailers from each of the 9 shortlisted movies from far off lands (like Canada):

Genre films follow a certain set of rules, and that’s rarely more evident than it is with slashers. If four young people go into the woods where a madman has already captured one young woman it’s almost certain these reckless young people will have sex and then be picked off by the killer until only the virgin remains. The kindly park ranger and hard-ass cops who stumble onto the scene will also fall victim to his murderous rampage. And the final shot will most likely be a jump-scare letting us know that the psycho has survived and may return for a sequel. But Israel, it appears, is not fond of following rules. Rabies is a new Israeli horror film (maybe the first), but while the setup feels familiar the resulting chaos that follows owes more to an episode of Three’s Company than it does to the slasher film genre.

I often find that, as a devotee to cinema and little else, I understand history through cinema. After all, cinema can take me to places I’ve never been and times I never lived with a particular sensory gestalt that’s simply not quite the same in other art forms. This is not to say that I make the mistake of substituting cinema for history, or treat cinema the same way I would treat a credible historical annal. But cinema, especially narrative fiction, has a fascinating capacity to represent subjective experiences and particular perspectives of history. By considering history through its cinematic representation, we may not become authorities of chronology, but rather understand emotions and experiences associated with lived events. Few movies claim to be comprehensive authorities of historical representation through cinema (and yes, selection, while problematic is essential for historical writing as well, but cinema simply provides yet another layer of artifice). Some films are canonized as such (anything from Saving Private Ryan to Ken Burns’s documentaries), but even as these are incomplete historiographies, they are in a sense “complete” biographies of thought, reflection, interpretation, and emotion.

‘Amreeka,’ a hit at this year’s Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals, tells a warmhearted, recognizable story about a family of Palestinian immigrants that smartly resists the urge to preach or turn political.

Waltz With Bashir opens on an animated, rain-soaked street to the sounds of growling. What follows is a real-life documentary and quest for answers.