Anatomy of a Fall is now available on pay-per-view prior to its streaming debut on Hulu.

Nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Actress, Directing, Original Screenplay, and Film Editing, Anatomy of a Fall is a French film in which the lead is played by a German actress whose character’s language of choice is English. It’s one of three international films nominated for this year’s Best Picture Oscar along with Past Lives, a U.S.-South Korean production mostly in English and Korean, and The Zone of Interest, a British film mostly in German.

Sandra Hüller, who is nominated for Best Actress, is also the star of The Zone of Interest, which is not yet available for home viewing.

Hüller, previously best known for her portrayal of the title character in 2016’s Toni Erdmann, is a revelation in Anatomy of a Fall playing a writer whose husband (Samuel Theis) is found dead in the snow by the couple’s 11-year-old, vision-impaired son (Milo Machado Graner) while out walking the family dog. Hüller’s character, a successful writer, was taking a nap at the time. She was exhausted from an interview with a young woman that had been interrupted by her husband’s playing of loud music while working in their country home’s attic. Did he jump, fall, or was he pushed out the attic window by Hüller as the police seem to think?

Courtroom dramas have been a staple in films as long as they have existed, certainly from the launch of the Oscars. At the 1928/29 Oscars, the second year in which they were awarded, Mary Pickford won a disputed Best Actress Oscar for taking the stand in Coquette. Critics of the day thought the Oscar should have gone to either Ruth Chatterton in Madame X or Jeanne Eagels in The Letter, both of which end with their leading lady on trial for murder. Film historians have long held that the Oscar should have gone to Maria Falconetti for the Franch The Passion of Joan of Arc, which takes place entirely during St. Joan’s 15th century trial for heresy which resulted in her condemnation and death via burning at the stake.

All these years later, the leading female performance that many consider the year’s best also revolves around a trial. Ironically, despite its stellar reviews, it is not considered the front-runner for this year’s Best Actress Oscar by today’s prognosticators. They seem to think that it should go to either Emma Stone, basically for bravely taking off her clothes multiple times throughout the comedy Poor Things, or Lily Gladstone for representing Native American women, none of whom have ever been nominated before, for what is basically a supporting role in Killers of the Flower Moon. Many of them are more incensed that Margot Robbie wasn’t nominated for bringing a plastic doll to life in Barbie than in cheering on any of the five actual nominees or being incensed at the exclusion of the more deserving Greta Lee in Past Lives, who like Hüller, plays a writer in a complicated relationship.

Nominated alongside Stone, Gladstone, and Hüller are Annette Bening as 60-year-old swimmer Diana Nyad in Nyad and Carey Mulligan as Leonard Bernstein’s long-suffering wife in Maestro. While Hüller’s competition is strong, none of them give performances that are better than her stunning work in Anatomy of a Fall.

It’s a tricky, complicated role to play as Hüller must appear innocent yet plausibly under suspicion at the same time as her lawyer (Swann Arlaud) and the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) battle it out in court while her impressionable son sits there taking it all in, refusing the judge’s request that he not attend the trial as he will read all about it on the internet anyway. In the end it is the boy who solves the mystery.

Hüller’s performance reminds me of Ingrid Bergman’s work in all three of her Oscar-winning roles. She’s slow to remember things as in Gaslight, confused as to how to act as in Anastasia, and at times remorseful as in Murder on the Orient Express. She’s also in a cantankerous love/hate relationship as Bergman was in her last Osar-nominated performance in Autumn Sonata. That relationship was about a mother and daughter not a husband and wife, just as Hüller’s character’s 300-page novel was about a mother and daughter based on her husband’s initial idea of a plot device about a husband and wife.

The Oscar-nominated screenplay was co-written by director Justine Triet and her husband, actor Arthur Harari. Triet is the only female director nominated for an Oscar for Best Directing this year, ahead of both Celine Song for Past Lives and Greta Gerwig for Barbie.

Another film worth catching before it streams on Hulu is All of Us Strangers, a film that has been nominated for six BAFTAs but failed to receive any Oscar nominations. BAFTA nominated it for Best British Film, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor (Paul Mescal), Supporting Actress (Claire Foy), and Casting. Oddly left out of BAFTA consideration are star Andrew Scott and supporting player Jamie Bell.

A mixture of reality and fantasy in the tradition of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death aka Stairway to Heaven, the film, written and directed by Andrew Haigh (45 Years, Lean on Pete), revolves around a gay man in his late forties (Scott) who is in a new relationship with a younger man (Mescal). Haunted by unresolved issues with his parents who died before his 12th birthday, he visits them in the house they raised him in before their untimely deaths in a car accident. There he finds his father (Bell) and mother (Foy) just as they were then, recognizing him as he is now.

All four actors are brilliant in their characterizations and should have featured in this year’s Oscar considerations, although to be fair, they were all up against strong contenders. Scott, best known for his TV work as the villainous Professor Moriarty opposite Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock, a series that ran sporadically from 2010-2017, will hopefully have other chances. Mescal, Oscar nominated for Aftersun last year, certainly will.

Bell, a BAFTA winner for Billy Elliot and nominee for Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool opposite Annette Bening, has never been nominated for an Oscar. Neither has Foy, an Emmy and BAFTA winner for The Crown who was also a BAFTA nominee for First Man opposite Ryan Gosling.

Happy viewing.