Oscar best bets include ‘Dreamgirls,’ ‘Queen’

“United 93,” “World Trade Center” — Hollywood’s first big-screen treatments of the Sept. 11 attacks were well-received by audiences and critics. Paul Greengrass’ agonizingly realistic “United 93,” a chronicle of passengers killed when their plane crashed after they fought back against terrorist hijackers, is the better of the two. But Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” starring Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena as policeman trapped in the rubble of the twin towers, is the bigger, more Oscar-like production, with a director who’s triumphed there before.

“Volver” — Penelope Cruz gives a career performance and is surrounded by a tremendous supporting ensemble in Pedro Almodovar’s rich, vibrant portrait of strong women making do without fickle men. Cruz is radiant in this comic drama about a single mother dealing with strange crises, including a mother (Carmen Maura) who seemingly has returned from the dead. Like “Letters From Iwo Jima,” the Spanish-language “Volver” could become a rare foreign-language film that breaks into the best-picture pack.

“The Good Shepherd” — In his second directing effort, Robert De Niro delivers a film with all the raw materials for an Oscar champion. He just needed to whittle a good half-hour off the excessive 2-hour, 40-minute running time. There’s a lot of fat De Niro could have cut off his epic saga of the CIA’s founding, which stars Matt Damon as a young poetry student recruited into the intelligence game, who becomes a lifer at the Company, a true believer that the dark espionage methods he pioneers will make the world a better place.

“Babel” — “Sprawling” is an adjective that could have been invented for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s far-flung drama that unfolds on three continents as it follows American, African, Mexican and Japanese families whose lives are intertwined by tragic events. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are the marquee names, but Inarritu has assembled a group of actors mostly new to U.S. audiences whose tremendous performances cement a diffuse story into a cohesive, compelling whole.

“Children of Men” — If academy voters tend to shun comedy, they practically run from futuristic stories. Yet Alfonso Cuaron’s stark, humanity-on-the-ropes thriller starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine is recognizably of our times and about our burning issues despite its setting 21 years from now. A provocative, frightening tale about a plague of infertility, the film is a bleakly beautiful study of how our prejudices, injustices and fear of outsiders might be magnified by a planet-wide crisis, and how something as simple as a baby can restore hope.

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