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Here are some films which have Oscar-contender written all the way through them like a stick of rock. This version of John Le Carré's 2001 novel is conceived on a grand, almost operatic scale with fervent and passionate performances from actors who come the new year may need shopping trolleys for the all the statuettes. Like The English Patient, there's a fair bit of grandstanding, but this film more than carries it off. Its shrewd producer, Simon Channing-Williams, had the inspired idea of hiring the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles to direct, and Meirelles has brought to this conspiracy-thriller-cum-love-story the unceasing energy and attack that characterised his sensational debut film City of God.

There is certainly none of the torpid melancholy and disillusion that tend to creep into screen versions of Le Carré - a reflex, perhaps, of his status as the most literary of spy novelists, whose works are sometimes thought of with a kind of Brideshead oboe playing regretfully somewhere in the background. Instead, Meirelles gives us something gutsier and less English. We get rage, restless curiosity, agonised self-reproach and whole landscapes lit up with lightning flashes of paranoia. The performances from Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz are excellent, perhaps the very best of their careers, and there is first-rate support, particularly from Bill Nighy as the Mephistophelean mandarin from the Foreign Office.

The Constant Gardener is a love story told in retrospect. Fiennes is Justin, a shy, introspective junior diplomat who falls in love with Tess (Weisz), a beautiful and fiery political activist. They marry and during a difficult posting to Kenya, Justin is informed that Tess has been killed while on her fact-finding trip into remote territory with an aid worker. He will not rest until he finds the truth about Tess's murder, which turns out to be a queasy conspiracy involving the exploitation of HIV-positive Africans, going up to the top of the British establishment. More importantly perhaps even than this, Justin uncovers painful secrets about his marriage, involving a messy and very human renegotiation of friendship with his colleague Sandy: another very good performance from Danny Huston, though perhaps a little hobbled by having to do an English accent. These disclosures result in his growing to admire his late wife even more passionately than before, as someone with humanity and idealism that, though flawed, exceeded his own. Posthumously, he falls in love with her again: his grief is transformed and charged with a visionary insight into Tess's real life.

The film is about betrayal, personal and political, but it provides a new perspective on EM Forster's remark about whether to betray one's friend or one's country. This is about being betrayed by one's country and one's friend; the two types of treason are conflated, and Justin finds himself in the midst of a Greeneian purgatory as he finds out more and more about what has been happening behind his back. The spiritual agony is compounded when Justin's detective work takes him to Germany and then to London, where Bill Nighy's sinister mandarin takes him to luncheon at his St James's Club. The Brazilian Meirelles is clearly a stranger to this habitat and his anthropological detachment enables him to bring out the essential strangeness and concealed brutality of its rituals.

There is a terrific pulse of energy in this film, a voltage which drives it over two hours. It is not just an intricate, despairing meditation on the shabby compromises involved in maintaining Britain's interests and waning foreign prestige. There is real anger here, and a real sense that it is worthwhile striking back against wrongdoing. Its global sweep is exhilarating and boldly cinematic, while also pointing up Justin's desolate loneliness. The Constant Gardener is a romance that packs a punch to equal The English Patient of 20 years ago.

Writer Stephen Gaghan ("Traffic", "The Alamo") created the fictional script for "Syriana" based on the non-fiction book "See No Evil" by Robert Baer. The interesting thing about Mr. Gaghan's script, though, isn't that its labyrinthine plot of conspiring Emirs, lawyers and CIA agents plotting to control the world's oil supply is so unbelievable. The most troublesome part of "Syriana" is that the movie is, in fact, so easy to believe.

"Syriana" has one of those interweaving plots that Robert Altman does so effortlessly. But where Mr. Altman's films seem to drift with ease from one subplot to another, "Syriana" is so ridiculously complex that the audience, at first straining to keep track of the characters and settings, eventually must give in and let the film run its course.

It's a shame because "Syriana" has a lot to say, and Mr. Gaghan has obviously done his homework. The film ostensibly revolves around an impending merger between two of the world's largest oil companies and the men assigned to investigate it and/or ensure that it takes place. To go into any more detail would be futile since "Syriana" not only invites but requires additional viewings to keep it all straight.

The huge ensemble cast is uniformly terrific. In particular Jeffrey Wright, always a strong presence, does some of his best work here as a lawyer slowly realizing the futility of his assignment. George Clooney, proudly over-weight and ruffled as a seen-it-all CIA operative, makes good use of his gift for understatement. Alexander Siddig, famously of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" does some heretofore unseen solid work as the man who would be Emir. Matt Damon and Amanda Peet as a husband and wife caught up in the dollars and senselessness of it all add some much-needed humanity to the film, which runs the risk of becoming a series of preachy board meetings. And, of course, Christopher Plummer is perfectly commanding as the head of Mr. Wright's law firm.

Mr. Gaghan steps behind the camera as the film's director and he has obviously learned some tricks from "Traffic" director Steven Soderbergh. The film's settings, particularly in Lebanon and the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, have the requisite feeling of immediacy. And the film's blistering pace makes its two-plus hour running time fly by.

The film never reaches the dizzying gamesmanship of Mr. Altman's films or the movie "Crash", however. Unlike those films, "Syriana", like "Traffic", contains many subplots which serve one master story, rather than multiple subplots around the same theme. Therefore, though the film does eventually pay off, it doesn't tie together in one of those beautiful the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts moments. There's a great monologue by a character named Danny Dalton (a pitch-perfect Tim Blake Nelson) about corruption which should have been the defining moment of everything in the film but instead just becomes another in a series of good moments which loosely hang together. It's a testament to Mr. Gaghan's script that - even without thoroughly understanding the film - you're able to get the gist of it.

Capote tells two stories, presenting both without hiccups. The first is an exposé of how the title author's In Cold Blood was written. The second shows the emotional and psychic dissolution of the man who starts out the film as a brilliant eccentric and finishes it as a basket case.

In Cold Blood made Truman Capote a household name, and led to him being ranked as one of the greatest American writers. It also destroyed him. He would never complete another book and, less than 20 years after finishing In Cold Blood, he would die of a drug overdose. Great authors often live unhappy lives. After his experiences putting together his legacy work, Capote's became almost unbearable. Bennett Miller's motion picture shows how obsession and self-absorption developed from personality traits into personal demons.

Capote opens in 1959. The title character (Philip Seymour Hoffman), tired of writing fiction, has decided to investigate four Kanas murders as a possible subject for a non-fiction article in the New Yorker magazine. With him, he takes his good friend, Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who has recently completed her manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird. The local police chief (Chris Cooper) offers reluctant cooperation. After the killers - Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) - are captured, Capote's interviews with Perry result in a twisted form of bonding and co-dependency. There is manipulation and empathy on both sides. At one point, Truman remarks, "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. One day, I went out the front door and he went out the back." Eventually, with the appeals process prolonging the execution of the death penalty, Truman reaches the point where he wants Perry to be hanged so this nightmarish phase of his life can reach closure. "All I want to do is write the ending, and there's no end in sight," he laments.

One cannot write about this film without tossing superlatives in the direction of Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose performance will earn him an Oscar nomination. Hoffman doesn't merely imitate Capote. He inhabits him with an intensity that demands acknowledgement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Catherine Keener, Chris Cooper, and Clifton Collins Jr. offer support, but this is Hoffman's movie from start to finish. Underrated for most of his career, this role will allow him to take his turn in the spotlight.

Capote is a deep movie with rich veins to mine. The lead character is not likeable. He is a user who exploits his relationship with Perry for personal gain. At the beginning, he doesn't know what it will ultimately cost him. As the movie develops, we see the complex love-and-hate association with Perry and how this results in the slow erosion of Capote's personality. The brilliance of Bennett's movie is that it concentrates on the characters and their interaction and never becomes a mouthpiece for one side or the other with respect to the death penalty. It would have been easy to turn Capote into a polemic, but Bennett resists the urge.

Although I had a stronger connection with Capote on an intellectual level than on an emotional level (I never came close to shedding a tear), the experience stayed with me for some time. That's unusual for something I see for the first time in the midst of a film festival. (In this case, Toronto.) Normally, movies falling into a mid-day slot leave a minimal aftertaste before being washed away by the next feature, but not this one.