article about the films most likely to get the Foreign Oscar:
15 Contenders for the Best International Feature Film Oscar Shortlist | IndieWire
1. Another Round - Denmark
Re-teaming with Mads Mikkelsen for the first time since the Cannes-acclaimed Oscar nominee “The Hunt,” the movie finds the actor playing a high school teacher in the midst of a midlife crisis who resorts to day-drinking as a means of curing his malaise. When he and a couple of buddies come across an obscure scientific report suggesting that drinking some small amount of booze during the day can improve their lives, it quickly becomes a reckless excuse to get toasted all the time. Vinterberg guides the movie from grim slapstick to tragedy and back again, a tonal balance he has excelled at achieving ever since “The Celebration” more than 20 years ago.
2. Apples - Greece
"Apples” is set in an analog alternative universe without social media or iPhones, at a time when a virus pandemic has cost many people their memories. The government takes unclaimed amnesiacs and teaches them how to grow new identities, keeping Polaroid scrapbooks of their experiences. In a masterful understated performance that recalls silent comedian Buster Keaton, Aris Servetalis plays a man who leaves subtle clues along the way about what he has remembered and forgotten. He loves apples and dancing, it seems, and obediently has sex with a fellow forgetter, but reveals a longing for something better. Less is more, as Nikou leaves the audience to read into the movie’s layers of mystery.
3. Beginning - Georgia
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s feature debut centers on a woman’s psychological breakdown after her Jehovah’s Witness village is attacked by terrorists. While it takes austerity to the extreme, with 35mm Academy ratio cinematography and long takes that could prove punishing for some viewers, “Beginning” is an exceptionally put together, often shocking point of view — the kind that would’ve wowed the executive committee had there been one this year.
4. Charlatan - Czech Republic
the movie follows famous Czech herbalist Jan Mikolásek (Czech movie star Ivan Trojan and his son Josef Trojan), whose commitment to healing took him through the interwar, Nazi, and Communist eras. But when his main Stalinist protector died, the regime went after him for his maverick, nonconformist ways. He’s a fascinating, charismatic character, on the one hand driven to cure illness, but also capable of cruelty, sadism and love — for his loyal assistant, František (Juraj Loj). Eventually, Mikolásek is arrested and put on trial.
5. Collective - Romania
Funded by HBO Europe, “Collective” follows a team of crack investigative journalists at sports daily Gazeta Sporturilor, who uncover the reasons why 37 burn victims died after a traumatic fire killed 27 people and injured another 180 on October 30, 2015 at the Bucharest nightclub Colectiv. Gazeta Sporturilor reporter Catalin Tolontan, the movie’s hero, stands up to the Romanian government and its incompetent health ministers by showing incontrovertible proof of just how much they lied to the public, at the cost of countless lives. “Collective” digs deep into the systemic corruption and greed that infects the entire country.
6. Dear Comrades - Russia
The latest black-and-white period drama from the versatile 83-year-old director Andrei Konchalovsky (“Tango & Cash,” “Paradise”) chronicles the violent shooting of workers demonstrating in Novocherkassk in 1962. Though the full violence of the event was buried at the time, Konchalovsky unearths the details in a deeply personal manner, by rooting the story in the perspective of devout party worker Lyudmila (Julia Vysotskaya) whose teen daughter goes missing in the chaos. As Lyudmila travels around town in search of her child, the woman is forced to question her governmental allegiances and contemplate the broader history of Russian conflict across generations. Merging an epic scale and period detail with the intimacy of a mother’s struggles, Konchalovsky’s powerful daylong story is a real-time thriller with a melodramatic backdrop that shows a master’s touch. It’s exactly the sort of complex juggling act that tends to make the cut in the international category — a searing political saga that’s also personal (not to mention a feast for the eyes).
7. Hope - Norway
In this fictionalized drama, two successful professionals and parents, a theater director (Andrea Bræin Hovig), and an older film producer (Stellan Skarsgård), have grown apart as they pursue their parallel lives. When she gets a terminal cancer diagnosis, she realizes that she has to count on her partner, who rises to the occasion, asking her to marry him. The stakes couldn’t be higher as they and their family and friends must power through the holidays as well as a wedding, and to the other side of this life-threatening illness.
8. I'm No Longer Here - Mexico
Frías’ second film, which went through the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, is set in Monterrey, Mexico and New York City in 2011. The movie stars a cast of non-pros lead by discovery Juan Daniel Garcia Treviño as Ulises, the colorful and charming leader of a street gang of cheerful, music-loving
cumbieros who like to dance and party, but run afoul of a local cartel and Mexico president Felipe Calderón’s war against drug trafficking. Ulises is forced to escape to New York, where he struggles to retain his cultural identity.
9. La Llorona - Guatemala
Bustamante uses the titular Latin American folk tale about a wailing woman with supernatural powers to explore Guatemala’s genocidal past. It’s atmospheric, scary, and sobering — and surely one of the more widely seen contenders this year.
10. The Mole Agent - Chile
Alberti’s delightful character study unfolds as an intricate spy thriller, with a sweet-natured 83-year-old widower named Sergio infiltrating a nursing home at the behest of private detective Romulo Aitke. The plan goes awry with all kinds of comical and touching results, so well-assembled within a framework of fictional tropes that it begs for an American remake.
11. My Little Sister - Switzerland
Lars Eidinger plays a stage thespian with leukemia cared for by his nurturing twin sister (German star Nina Hoss), a playwright who fights for her brother’s life. The sister finds herself in the position of so many women who must juggle the demands of work, family, and caretaking.
12. Never Gonna Snow Again - Poland
Szumowska and her cinematographer Englert co-direct this visually spellbinding tale that packs a quirky ensemble of people struggling to pinpoint their sadness. Utgoff’s Zhenia has the power to heal — spiritually? sexually? all of the above? — but at what cost to him?
13. Notturno - Italy
This time, Rosi turned to the places that the people he filmed left behind. “At a certain point, I thought it was a necessity, a very strong need, to cross the sea and go to Syria, to Iraq, to the places where this exodus was coming from to try to understand,” Rosi told me at an IDA Q&A.
For the first eight months of his three-year odyssey along the refugee-burdened borders of Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon, Rosi shot nothing. Instead, he talked to people, found striking locations, and later returned with his camera to track his cast of characters for two more years. “I wanted the film to be the echo of the war,” he said, “and then try to follow the daily life of people that I met in my journey.”
14. A Sun - Taiwan
This story about a struggling family shattered by a terrible crime starts with a psychopathic gangster amputating a chef’s hand into a vat of hot soup, it ends with a warm moment of grace more than 20 years in the making, and it bridges the time in between with a matter-of-fact story so attuned to the moral velocity of real life that you don’t appreciate the opera of it all until the final curtain call.
15. Vitalena Varela - Portugal
“Vitalena Varela” follows the titular woman as she returns to her decrepit town after husband dies. The a slow-burn atmospheric character study is an absorbing and visually complex achievement driven by the sense of loss and religious yearning of its central character, who wanders the vacant streets while unleashing a series of profound monologues about her struggle.
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. Sadly, the entire interface is all over the damn place but cinema breh
Germany for me is where the money is at. The movie Transit that I recommended in the "watching thread" was amazing. 
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. I remember watching another Italian movie where this dude was pregnant and it really pissed me off because it was stupid as all hell, but a beautiful trainwreck to watch 
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