Oscars 2022: The 15 Films Most Likely to Be Shortlisted for Best International Feature

“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”

Country: Romania
Release: November 19 (Magnolia Pictures)

“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” begins as the story of a sex tape gone wrong, with circumstances unfolding on the restless streets of Bucharest as the frantic problems of a schoolteacher and the community divided against her take place against much larger concerns. Then, the movie zooms out to a cosmic degree, folding in a prolonged montage of terms for modern times that encapsulate virtually every phase of human history. Romanian director Radu Jude’s astonishing satire (which won the Golden Bear at Berlinale) comes from a most unusual combination by jamming together two very different kind of movies that shouldn’t work in harmony, but end up making perfect sense.

The story is bookended by the plight of Emi (Katia Pascariu), a schoolteacher whose sex tape is leaked, leading parents in the community to arrange a tribunal about her future. Shot in the midst of the pandemic, these scenes of frantic masked characters bickering about family values take on a heightened absurdity all the way through the deranged finale, a final act of feminist empowerment too good to spoil here. Before that, Jude takes a break with an essay film featuring “a short dictionary of anecdotes, signs, and wonders” that encompasses fragments of Romania’s Socialist history alongside poetry, architecture, and eroticism. It’s a dizzying assemblage that puts the inanity of Emi’s conundrum in a remarkable big-picture context. If the Academy really wants to prove its cinema-first bonafides, it’ll take a gamble on this visionary submission. —EK

“Compartment No. 6”

Country: Finland
Release: January 26, 2022 (Sony Pictures Classics)

Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen’s second feature takes a familiar odd-couple formula and gives it a fresh spin. The story of aimless college grad Laura (Seidi Haarla) finds the young woman finishing school in Moscow and deciding to leave her girlfriend behind for a train ride to see some petroglyphs at a remote locale. That ambitious journey turns into an endurance test once she finds herself stuck in a small train car with a hard-drinking skinhead Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) as a roommate. But Ljoha just wants to have a good time, and eventually, his rough-but-amiable overtures rub off on her as the pair gradually realize they share some common ground in their mutual sense of displacement.

A sweet tale of cross-cultural bonding with a hard-edged spirit, “Compartment No. 6” finds its central characters bickering their way across the chilly Russian countryside as they realize that the journey is the real destination. That’s a fairly obvious point, of course, but Kuosmanen’s actors deliver such endearing performances that it’s always fun to watch them sort through the nature of the trip. Its climactic act, an adventurous attempt to reach the finish line against dire circumstances, takes the movie into survival territory as the filmmaker makes it clear that these two lost souls have found their calling in the reckless abandon they bring to realizing their goal — and we’re right there with them. If this year’s shortlist needs one more familiar life-affirming movie about two lost souls finding catharsis in companionship — look no further. —EK

“Drive My Car”

Country: Japan
Release: November 24 (Sideshow and Janus Films)

Adapted by “Happy Hour” and “Asako I & II” auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi from a short story by Haruki Murakami, “Drive My Car” is a head-on collision between an emerging filmmaker fascinated by the interior lives of women, and a famous author who… is not (to say nothing of his other charms, Murakami is more into mysterious pixie dream girls). But these two wildly disparate storytellers aren’t the only people vying for control of the wheel in this beguiling three-hour gem, as a third major figure is soon introduced to help steer them in the same direction: legendary playwright Anton Chekhov.

The result is a low-key but deeply resonant tale about a strange chapter in the life of a grieving theater director, an intimate stage whisper of a film in which every scene feels like a secret. When Yūsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijimai) agrees to stage his unique version of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima, he still listens to his dead wife’s recordings of the text while driving around. Yūsuke is reluctantly forced to extend his trust to the 23-year-old driver (Tôko Miura) who’s been assigned as his chauffeur; he puts her life in his hands, and she controls that Saab with such assurance that Yūsuke often forgets he’s in a car at all. If only the actors in his play could sync up so well.

For all of his loquaciousness and literary flow, Hamaguchi never loses sight of the psychosexual intrigue that fuels Murakami’s story. “Drive My Car” encourages us to find our own solace in the silence beyond words, and insists that even the people we love most are liable to get lost in translation. Difficult as it might sound to win Academy support for an epic so quiet and stagey, Hamaguchi’s film speeds along from the moment it starts, and has such ardent support around the world that the international contingent alone could help cement a spot on the shortlist. —DE

“Flee”

Country: Denmark
Release: December 3 (NEON)

There have been countless movies about the immigration crisis, but none of them have the sheer ingenuity of “Flee.” In Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s poignant animated documentary, an Afghan refugee recounts his 20-year survival story, and the dazzling storytelling goes there with him. Yet the remarkable graphic stye works in tandem with a narrative that would stun in any format: As the man — identified only by a pseudonym, Amin Nawabi — gradually opens up about his experiences, “Flee” builds to a powerful secret buried in his past that reframes the global migrant crisis in intimate terms. From the moment Amin first appears, his bearded face rendered as a delicate 2D image, he’s wrestling with how to tell his story. With time, “Flee” becomes his cinematic catharsis, as Amin recounts his journey in fits and starts, while the animation turns his memories into a bracing adventure that couldn’t be timelier. A true category-busting filmmaking achievement (in the context of Oscars, its achievements stretch across Best Documentary, International, Animation…and perhaps even Best Picture), “Flee” is a crowdpleaser that works on many satisfying levels at once. —EK

“The Hand of God”

Country: Italy
Release: November 24 (Netflix)

The Academy (along with the rest of the world) hasn’t exactly flipped its lid for Paolo Sorrentino’s recent films, but the Oscar he won in this category for “The Great Beauty” suggests they aren’t allergic to the Italian auteur’s orgiastic cinema so long as it maintains a strong emotional core. That should be enough to push “The Hand of God” — undoubtedly Sorrentino’s most poignant and personal work — onto the shortlist following its well-received tour along the fall festival circuit. A soberingly autobiographical coming-of-age story about a Neopolitan teenager whose entire world is lost and redeemed in almost the same breath, “The Hand of God” finds Sorrentino revisiting the summer when Diego Maradona’s miraculous transfer to Naples coincided with the greatest tragedy of the director’s life. The film might be shot with uncharacteristic restraint by Sorrentino’s baroque standards, but its relative calm allows him to crystallize a truth that was sometimes lost in his more circus-like epics about the overlap between the sacred and the profane: Heaven and hell are very real places that co-exist right here on Earth, often on top of and inside each other so completely that people are liable to lose sight of where they were until they’ve left it behind. —DE

“A Hero”

Country: Iran
Release: January 7, 2022 (Amazon Studios)

Epitomized by the heart-wrenching uncertainty of 2011’s “A Separation,” Farhadi’s social melodramas begin with straightforward predicaments that are peeled back — layer by layer, and with deceptive casualness — while the hard bulb of a moral crisis is revealed deep underneath. His stories are better described as dilemmas, and those dilemmas unfold with the frustration, resolve, and steadily increasing ferocity of a cat batting a tethered ball to itself around a pole until the string is stretched tight enough that everything chokes to a standstill.

Farhadi plays to his strengths with “A Hero,” as he takes a classic premise — a man stumbles upon a bag full of money that obviously belongs to someone else — and spins it around and around and around with enough centrifugal force to keep you rooted in place even as your sympathies fly in every conceivable direction. By the time this expertly constructed ethical whirlygig finally slows to a stop, Farhadi’s simplest film since “A Separation” has somehow become the most ambivalent as well (and not incidentally also the best). It stings that Iran was too insecure to submit Panah Panahi’s even stronger and more overtly critical “Hit the Road,” but “A Hero” finds a unique artist working near the height of his powers, and will likely find itself in the mix come Oscar night. —DE

“I’m Your Man”

Country: Germany
Release: September 24 (Bleecker Street)

Germany selected well-received “I’m Your Man” (Bleecker Street), in current release stateside, directed by actress-writer-director Maria Schrader. The film stars charming British German-speaker Dan Stevens as a live-in android lover who is at first resisted by a workaholic professor (Maren Eggert) who is evaluating the service provided by a humanoid exquisitely tuned in to a woman’s deepest desires. As the movie digs into the gaps between the sexes, such resistance proves futile. Could a robot prove to be a more satisfying partner than a real live human? Actor-turned-director Schrader, who last handled Netflix’s breakout limited series hit “Unorthodox,” has once again made a movie about one woman learning to come to terms with her greater potential. In that respect, “I’m Your Man” is only sci-fi in the flimsiest sense, and seems less invested in epistemological questions than the way they speak to its protagonist’s soul-searching malaise. With time, Tom’s eager-to-please machinery unlocks much of the deep-seated dissatisfaction plaguing her life. A stimulating film that’s also more broadly accessible than many of the other contenders on this list, “I’m Your Man” could prove to be a dark horse in a category otherwise dominated by Cannes breakouts. —AT

“The Intruder”

Country: Argentina
Release: Seeking U.S. Distribution

Argentina selected Natalia Meta’s moody second feature, Berlin 2020 selection “The Intruder,” based on the novel by C.E. Feiling, starring riveting Erica Rivas (“Wild Tales”) as a charming voiceover artist and chorus singer who starts to unravel after abruptly losing her clingy romantic partner (Daniel Hendler). She suffers nightmares that seep into her daily life, as her work microphones emit strange soundsThe Intruder and her voice stops making any sounds at all. She starts to question her hold on reality, and when her mother (Cecilia Roth) arrives to help out, things go from bad to worse. Without U.S. distribution in place “The Intruder” may have difficulty elbowing aside heavyweights like “Drive My Car” and “The Worst Person in the World,” but Meta so expertly navigates this “Black Swan” psychodrama — her rich aural design enhancing the film’s creepy dreamscape — that it should win a measure of support from all who make the time to watch it. —AT

“Lamb”

Country: Iceland
Release: October 8 (A24)

Even with the Best International Feature category expanding its horizons a bit in recent years, “Lamb” may still be a bit too batshit for Academy tastes. Spoiler alert for anyone who’s yet to see the movie or its trailer, but Valdimar Jóhannsson’s film is about a young Icelandic couple, María (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason), who adopt a child with the head of a lamb as their daughter. Wild as that premise may sound, it’s also par for the course for an A24 horror movie, and this artful debut is clearly the work of a filmmaker who’s been schooled in the eloquent atmospheric horror of “The Witch” and “Hereditary.” “Lamb” is likewise slow to show its cards, and it’s possible that Oscars voters might be seduced by its first act — and its sneaky resemblance to the more normal slice-of-life fare that has traditionally fed into this category — before things get really freaky. That’s reason enough to hope that it makes the cut. —DE

“Lingui, or the Sacred Bonds”

Country: Chad
Release: February 4, 2022 (MUBI)

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s slender yet riveting “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds” is a story about a woman trying to secure an abortion for her 15-year-old daughter in a country where terminating a pregnancy violates both national and religious laws, but — as its title suggests in two different languages — this soft hammer of a social drama is less concerned with the cruelties of Chad’s politics than it is with how people help each other to endure them together.

“Lingui” is a Chadian term that represents a tradition of altruism: a collective resilience in the face of catastrophic ordeals. When a group of young men wordlessly pulls the teenage Maria (Rihane Khalil-Alio) out from a riverbed after she tries to drown herself, that is lingui. When Maria’s mother Amina (Achouackh Abakar Soulymane) agrees to aid her estranged sister at a moment of irrevocable crisis, that is lingui. When Maria’s school, afraid of how gossip might reflect on them, expels the girl the minute they learn of her delicate condition… that is why lingui is so necessary. The entrancing space that “Lingui” notches between personal circumstance and elemental strife mirrors the balance Haroun strikes between his Spartan approach to narrative and newfound visual command. It also allows Haroun to arrive at the perfect grace note for a story that would risk betraying the harsh reality faced by Chad’s women if it resolved with a fairy tale ending. Lingui can only exist in the face of great hardship, and Haroun’s surprisingly cathartic film honors the tradition by celebrating the fact that it still does. Even more surprising is that Chad’s nominating committee seems to agree. —DE

“Memoria”

Country: Colombia
Release: December 25 (NEON)

“Memoria” begins with the first jump scare in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s career, but the sudden impact isn’t as relevant as the way it resonates in the silence that follows. Anyone familiar with the slow-burn lyricism at the center of the Thai director’s work knows how he adheres to a dreamlike logic that takes its time to settle in. The Colombia-set “Memoria,” his first movie made outside his native country, does that as well as anything in “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” or “Cemetery of Splendour.” But this time around, there’s a profound existential anxiety creeping in.

With Tilda Swinton’s puzzled gaze as its guide, “Memoria” amounts to a haunting, introspective look at one woman’s attempts to uncover the roots of a mysterious sound that only she can hear. More than that, it’s a masterful and engrossing response to the rush of modern times and the collective amnesia it creates. Anyone frustrated by its patience only serves to prove the point. “Boonmee” didn’t make the Oscar shortlist despite winning the Palme, but fingers crossed that Swinton’s presence is enough to seduce the nominating committee towards the joys of slow cinema. —EK

“Prayers for the Stolen”

Country: Mexico
Release: November 17 (Netflix)

Mexico has witnessed over 80,000 disappearances since former President Felipe Calderon declared war on drug cartels in 2006. A quarter of the missing are women — the majority of them teenage girls. “Prayers for the Stolen,” Mexican-Salvadorian director Tatiana Huezo’s first narrative feature, takes place amidst this national nightmare, depicting the dangers and deep-seated fears that families have long endured. Told through the lens of three girls as they grow up in a rural town in the Guerrero mountains, Huezo’s film is a murky, mesmerizing look at what it feels like to come of age in a place where young women have a target on their backs, and where the adults are as powerless as the children.

As a documentary filmmaker, Huezo has immersed herself in communities across Mexico and her native El Salvador to show the human consequences of their seemingly endless wars. In “Tempestad” (2016), she tells the story of two women exploited by the drug war in Mexico, and here she brings the same harrowing overtone of urgency to her fiction debut. —SG

“Titane”

Country: France
Release: October 1 (NEON)

In a Cannes wrap-up piece highlighting the best films at this year’s festival, IndieWire’s awards guru Anne Thompson understandably predicted that Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning “Titane” — a freaky modern fable about a homicidal maniac who gets impregnated by a car in the process of forging a decidedly non-traditional kind of family — would be “far too provocative to be France’s Oscar submission.” Needless to say, Anne wasn’t alone in thinking that; even the movie’s biggest supporters feared that a Palme d’Or wouldn’t be enough to sway a committee known for playing things safe, even at the expense of a generational masterpiece like “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

And yet, here we are. Cooler heads having prevailed, “Titane” is officially in the running, and the decision to make it eligible should be enough to land it a spot on the Academy shortlist without too much trouble. Will its polarizing nature and muted U.S. box office make it the first submitted Palme-winner since 2014’s “Winter Sleep” to miss out on a nomination (France chose “Mustang” over “Dheepan” in 2016)? Stranger things have happened, but at this point it might be unwise to bet against a movie that has done nothing but defy expectations since the day it premiered. —DE

“Unclenching the Fists”

Country: Russia
Release: TBD (MUBI)

Savvy viewers of bleak Eastern European festival fare will get a sense early on in “Unclenching the Fists” why “Beanpole” director Kantemir Balagov (who made the shortlist at the 92nd Oscars) championed this Russian slice of neorealism. Kira Kovalenko’s Cannes Un Certain Regard—winning sophomore feature operates in that same kind of brutal austerity, as if the movie was conceived and shot from inside the bowels of a landfill. (“Unclenching the Fists” was also produced by Alexander Rodnyansky, producer on “Beanpole” and Oscar nominee “Leviathan.”) But at the same time, Kovalenko excavates from the rust-dappled rubble of a metaphor for the patriarchy’s dependence on women a suddenly powerful coming-of-ager about a teenage girl breaking free.

With bows at Telluride, New York, and AFI following Cannes, “Unclenching” has had as healthy a festival run as any film poised for Oscar contention this year. And while the film is set in the agriculturally anemic North Ossetia region of Russia, this story of a young woman trying to break out of the codependent clutches of her father and two brothers turns from grim to universally hopeful. The film deftly examines how power-seeking men siphon off the backs of women to erect their oppressive structures — which in turn depend on women to exist at all.

Director Kovalenko, a former student of “Russian Ark” filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, directs with rigid formalism that gets looser as the film comes undone. Meanwhile, newcomer Milana Aguzarova plays Ada with the ticking intensity of a time bomb kept in check. “Unclenching” eventually heads to the Mubi streaming platform, which could boost its profile, but for now the film has to float on special screenings and Q&As. Anyone who sits down for this film won’t come out unaffected.

Russia made the shortlist for the last two years but hasn’t secured a nomination since Andrey Zvyagintsevs 2017 “Loveless.” —RL

“The Worst Person in the World”

Country: Norway
Release: February 4, 2022 (NEON)

No movie submitted for the Best International Feature category this year has broader support or greater crossover potential than Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” a sharp and entrancing pivot back to the restless films he once made about beautiful young people suffering from the vertigo of time moving through their bodies (this critic was relatively mezzo-mezzo on the movie after its Cannes premiere, but has since come around to embrace its charms). One of its most undeniable selling points: Renate Reinsve’s winsomely honest performance as Julie, a twentysomething medical student whose commitment issues extend to her career, her love life, and ultimately to her identity itself. “When was life supposed to start?” the film’s narrator asks on Julie’s behalf, her rhetorical question belying the obvious fact that it already has. Some may struggle with a third act that exchanges the breezy love triangle of the first two in favor of far more dire circumstances — Trier’s film is already so agonizingly relatable, even during its lightest moments — but “The Worst Person in the World” cuts too deep not to connect with huge swaths of the Academy’s voting body. Expect it to go far, at the Oscars and beyond. —DE