There’s been a lot of talk in this country recently about the importance of the rule of law, and three new international films shed light on that issue from the perspectives of those both inside and outside systems of power. In both Santosh and The Prosecutor, set respectively in rural India and urban Hong Kong, the cynicism and corruption of legal systems are laid bare to idealistic protagonists, while in Brazil’s I’m Still Here, the real-life consequences of the abandonment of impartial justice echo through a family’s lives.

The latter, which has been nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, takes place in the early 1970s, when the country was in the midst of a 21-year-long military dictatorship. Despite the political turmoil, which includes regular kidnappings of foreign ambassadors by dissidents, the family of Rubens (Selton Mello) and Eunice (Fernanda Torres) Paiva exists in material comfort and happiness. Their home echoes with the sound and energy of five children, four of them girls, and a bustling social life. But there are subtler echoes as well, of things unsaid, of anxieties hidden from the kids, of the ingrained habits one develops living under authoritarian rule. When a family close to the Paivas moves to London, their eldest, Veroca (Valentina Herszage) goes with, a decision made after Veroca and her friends are stopped one night by a military police blockade hunting for rebels.

Still, life continues, until one day it doesn’t. A knock on the door from plainclothes agents. Rubens, a former Congressman, taken into custody “to give a deposition.” Before long, Eunice and the next-oldest daughter, Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) also find themselves at the concrete police station, where more desperate echoes, of prisoners pleading for mercy and asserting their innocence, fill the forbidding corridors. After twelve days of captivity, Eunice is released, but Rubens’s fate remains unknown. Undeterred, she attempts to walk the tightrope between pushing for information and spreading the word about his disappearance, which is officially denied, and maintaining her family’s stability. Torres, a Best Actress nominee, delivers a performance of monumental dignity and fierce forbearance that accumulates in power and impact, even as the film make temporal leaps in its final act to demonstrate that, despite everything, time does not in fact heal all wounds.

Director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries, On the Road) knew the Paiva family in his youth, and I’m Still Here is based on a book by Eunice and Rubens’s son Marcelo. That intimate perspective shows up on screen, not only in the convincing period detail (shot in perfectly grainy, sun-bleached 35mm) but in the empathy and respect the film has for Eunice. I’ll admit to an initial reluctance to embrace the victimhood of a family that, despite its sympathies, seems to thrive amidst broader political oppression. But as we approach the film’s final scenes, which feature Fernanda Montenegro (herself an Oscar nominee for Salles’s Central Station back in 1998) in a remarkable cameo as an elderly Eunice, the emotional power that has accumulated reaches a delicate climax. The personal cost of living under a lawless, cruel regime has rarely been more eloquently captured. (Opens Friday, January 31, at Cinema 21)

One of the preconditions for the erosion of the rule of law and the rise of authoritarianism, according to many who’ve studied the phenomenon, is widespread political cynicism. The belief that rules and processes aren’t applied fairly and that legal systems are rigged makes abandoning those systems seem not so bad. The title character in writer-director Sandhya Suri’s first feature, Santosh, is forced to confront this dilemma after the death of her husband leads to her assumption of his job as a constable in rural norther India. Santosh (Shahana Goswami) takes to her unexpected career with serious intent, despite the inevitable bullshit she has to put up with as a woman. She does, however, have something of a role model and mentor: the veteran female officer Geeta (a terrific Sunita Rajwar), who takes Santosh under her wing and enlists her as second-in-charge of the investigation of a local teenaged girl whose raped and mutilated body is found at the bottom of a well.

Santosh would be fully entertaining as a gripping policier set in an unfamiliar geographical and societal landscape, but it simultaneously functions as a critique of inequality, whether based on caste (the victim came from a Dalit family), religion (the initial suspect is Muslim), or gender (no one in this misogynistic realm is really that interested in solving this horrific crime). Not content to simply tell a story of Santosh’s empowerment as she confronts sexism, Suri creates a deliciously complicated relationship between Santosh and Geeta, whose achievements in the male-dominated police force have come, it would seem, at the cost of her soul. Whether Santosh is willing to compromise hers is the real tension at the heart of this gripping drama that was the United Kingdom’s submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar.

P.S. Whether the United Kingdom, which also submitted last year’s winner in that category, The Zone of Interest, should get to claim its former colony’s story as its own simply because it is a British co-production is a separate discussion. But based on the fact that India neglected even to submit the wonderful All We Imagine as Light this year makes one appreciate the gesture on Santosh’s behalf. (Opens Friday, January 31, at Living Room Theaters and Regal Fox Tower)

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Although it also follows the journey of a law enforcement professional who uncovers shenanigans in the criminal justice system, director-star Donnie Yen’s The Prosecutor doesn’t dive quite as deeply into its hero’s moral quandaries. Yen, the veteran martial arts star of Hong Kong cinema whose crossover work includes appearances in both the Star Wars and John Wick franchises, plays Fok Zi Hou, a decorated police detective who retired from the force to go to law school and work as a prosecutor for the island enclave’s Department of Justice. (The movie presents without comment the fact that Hong Kong, despite being a Chinese possession since 1997, still uses British legal traditions, powdered wigs and all.)

On his very first case, Fok rebels against his superiors after an innocent young man is convinced to plead guilty by his defense attorneys after receiving a package of cocaine in the mail. Even though, as he’s told time and again, a prosecutor’s job is to secure convictions, he persists in actually pursuing justice. (Shocking, right?) Of course, this being a Donnie Yen picture, that doesn’t mean just poking around files in the DOJ offices, it also means taking it to the streets, including several capably executed action sequences. The most impressive is a climactic, rambunctious roundelay set in that most reliable of fight-scene transports, a subway car. I neither know nor care how much help Yen, 61, may have had from stunt doubles during these moments of mayhem—he’s still more than capable of wielding roundhouse kicks and hockey sticks as anti-hoodlum devices. (At this age, Jackie Chan, for all his greatness, was well into his voicing-cartoon-animals era.)

Ultimately, Fok ferrets outs malfeasance not only by the dastardly, mobbed-up defense bar, but the government bureaucracy itself. (Corruption? In the Department of Justice? Do tell…) Like Santosh, The Prosecutor exposes hypocrisy within the ranks of those we trust to uphold the law. On the contrary, however, it culminates in a powerful speech about the need to preserve, protect, and respect the state’s administration of justice. It’s hard to imagine that any moral more fraught than that would pass the Chinese government’s censor’s test.

All three of these films arrive from nations with current or recent experience with authoritarian rule (treating Santosh as an Indian film). Their makers know whereof they speak. Whether that means that we in the U.S. should view them as cautionary tales is something that each viewer will have to determine for themselves. (Opens Friday, Jan. 31, at the Hollywood Theatre)

ALSO OPENING

Love Me: This sci-fi fable, which stars Kristen Stewart as a buoy and Stephen Yeun as a satellite, gets points for more than just originality. It begins in the distant past and quickly observes, from space, the planet Earth as it gives rise to life, humanity, and then apocalypse, all in the relative blink of an eye. Millennia later, an orbiting repository of all human knowledge (or at least what was on the Internet in the early 21st century) makes contact with a “smart buoy” that reboots after eons of inactivity. The buoy accesses the satellite’s database and, sifting through it, latches on to a series of online videos featuring a vlogger named Deja (Stewart) and her boyfriend Liam (Yeun). It then uses that content as the scaffolding for a virtual reality relationship with the satellite, in which the rituals depicted within (date night with Blue Apron quesadillas, singing the Friends theme song together) are re-enacted in an initially hopeless quest for authenticity and connection. The entities are represented by CGI avatars that start off crude but become more lifelike (i.e. the actors themselves) as billions of years roll by. Plenty of Big Questions bubble through Love Me, most related to the nature of love and/or the nature of artificial intelligence, but the first feature from married writer-directors Sam and Andy Zuchero is more of a thought experiment than a treatise on such matters. It’s a fable—at least, I assume it’s a fable and that “I’ll Be There For You” won’t really be echoing throughout the cosmos eternally—and a generally engaging one at that. (Opening Friday, Jan. 31, at Regal Fox Tower, Salem Cinema, and other area theaters)

You’re Cordially Invited: When his beloved (maybe too beloved?) daughter Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan, Drive-Away Dolls) announces her engagement to a DJ, proud papa Jim (Will Ferrell) books the exclusive island resort where he married her now-dead mother for the festivities. Due to a clerical error—the death of the elderly clerk—the place ends up reserved by Margot (Reese Witherspoon), a hotshot LA-based reality-show producer, for the nuptials of her younger sister Neve (Meredith Hagner, Search Party) and her beau, a Chippendale’s dancer and Channing Tatum lookalike. When both wedding parties show up, the hapless manager (Jack McBrayer, 30 Rock) can only witness the chaos that develops when they decide to try to share the place. Overseeing a series of skits (“The Rehearsal Dinner,” “The Ceremony,” “The Reception”) more than a full-blown narrative, writer-director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) relies heavily on the likeability of his stars, especially Ferrell, whose improvisations are, I suspect, responsible for most of the movie’s best laugh lines. Among the sprawling cast, Keyla Monterroso Mejia (hilarious in Season 11 of Curb Your Enthusiasm) and treasured character actor Celia Watson stand out as, respectively, Jenni’s maid of honor and Margot and Neve’s acerbic Southern mother. Things shift far too frequently and awkwardly between mild goofiness and cloying sentiment, until finally succumbing to alligator-infused insanity in the final third. It could have used more cartoonish absurdity and sharper humor, but there are a few good laugh lines, including a last-act revelation of Jim’s occupation that qualifies as a deadpan masterpiece. (Streaming on Amazon Prime)

Companion: “A billionaire’s death sets off a chain of events for Iris and her friends during a weekend trip to his lakeside estate.” (Opens Friday, Jan. 31, wide)

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Dog Man: “Dog Man (voice of writer-director Peter Hastings), half dog and half man, is sworn to protect and serve as he doggedly pursues the feline supervillain Petey the Cat (voice of Pete Davidson).” (opening Friday, Jan. 31, wide)

Green and Gold: “A struggling family farmer (Craig T. Nelson) wagers everything on a high-stakes Championship bet, while his granddaughter’s musical ambitions could be their ticket to a new beginning.” (The bet is that the Green Bay Packers will win the Super Bowl.) (opening Friday, Jan. 31, wide)

Valiant One: “With tensions between North and South Korea, a US helicopter crashes on the North Korean side. Now the survivors must work together to protect a civilian tech specialist and find their way out without the help of US military support.” (Opens Friday, Jan. 31, wide)

ALSO THIS WEEK

Cascade Festival of African Films: Returning for its 35th (!) year, CFAF kicks off on Friday, Jan. 31, with the Tunisian drama Everybody Loves Touda, about a single mother pursuing a singing career, and continues with seventeen other offerings from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, and other countries whose films rarely make it to American screens. Among the anticipated highlights are a preview screening of the upcoming release On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Thursday, Feb. 5) and a pair of excellent 2024 documentaries, Dahomey and Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. The festival runs through March 1, and as ever all screenings are free. Further coverage to follow in this space over the coming weeks. (Visit website for full schedule and screening locations)

Boys Go to Jupiter: “Set in the liminal period between Christmas and New Year’s, the story follows the adventures of Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett), a teenage gig worker with a rise-and-grind mindset whose quest to make $5,000 is derailed by the appearance of a gelatinous little dude from outer space. Using the power of lo-fi musical numbers and deadpan comedy, Billy must save Donut and his family from the evil schemes of the Dolphin Groves Juice Company. The voice cast—which also includes Julio Torres, Sarah Sherman, Joe Pera, Cole Escola, and Elsie Fisher—is a who’s who of weirdo comedy all-stars, adding to the charmingly strange vibe.” (Saturday, Feb. 1, Tomorrow Theater)

REPERTORY

Friday

• Eraserhead [1977] (Cinema 21, also Saturday)
• Lost Highway [1997] (Cinemagic, through Sunday)
• Round Midnight [1986] (5th Avenue Cinemas, through Sunday)
• To Die For [1995] (Tomorrow Theater)

Saturday

• 1-800-On-Her-Own [2024] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Hiding Henry [2024] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Men in Black [1997] (Hollywood Theatre, benefit for Portland Pug Rescue)
• Mulholland Dr. [2000] (Cinemagic, also 2/4)
• Singin’ in the Rain [1952] (Cinema 21)

Sunday

• David Lynch: The Art Life [2016] (Cinemagic, through Tuesday)
• Groundhog Day [1993] (Tomorrow Theater, Hollywood Theatre)
• Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat [2024] (Tomorrow Theater)

Monday

• Dig! XX [2005/2025] (Hollywood Theatre)

Tuesday

• Cocaine Wars [1985] (Hollywood Theatre)

Wednesday

• Cowboy Bebop: The Movie [2001] (limited release; also 2/6 & 2/9)
• Hellraiser [1987] (limited release; also 2/6)
• Spell [1977] (Clinton St. Theater)

Thursday

• Old Joy [2006] (Hollywood Theatre)