Golden Globe Awards

As Randi, a young woman rebuilding her life after a devastating loss, Michelle Williams delivers a quietly powerful performance that adds a whole other dimension to Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By The Sea. “When you love someone so much right next to that thought is what would I do if I lost (that person), Williams stold us.

In director Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures Octavia Spencer plays mathematician Dorothy Vaughn, one of the real-life pioneers of space exploration, a team of women (including a contingent of African Americans) who worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – the precursor of NASA- in the early 1960s, crunching the numbers that put Americans among the stars while dealing with racism and bigotry. Playing Dorothy, Spencer told us, led her to be “extremely, extremely grateful to have been  born in this time because there were so many women like Dorothy Vaughn who paved the way for me.

A boy from a remote village finds himself, by accident, alone and lost in the streets of Calcutta – and, from there, in a comfortable home in Tasmania, adopted by loving Australian parents. In Lion, the cinematic version of this real life story, Nicole Kidman plays Sue Brierley, the boy’s devoted adoptive mother – and her first Australian character in a long while.

“On Moonlight it was heavy on set because I only had the three days to shoot that role so because it was so intense I just kind of had to stay in the skin of Paula as much as I possibly could to get through”, Naomie Harris told us, describing the experience of creating a key character in writer-director Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight: Paula, a drug addict and reluctant mother to Chiron, the film’s protagonist. The daughter of a strong and successful woman, Harris admits she had “reservations about playing a crack addict”, a bravura performance that earned her this nomination.

Reprising the role she played on Broadway opposite Denzel Washington, Viola Davis is a quiet storm of determination, anger and devotion as Rose, the wife of the hard-headed, short-tempered Troy (played again by Denzel Washington, who directed the film from a script by playwright August Wilson). “August Wilson wrote the screenplay more than two decades ago and it lends itself to the cinematic experience because really at the heart of the story it's just about a family and we've seen these epic stories before”, Davis told us.

Colin Farrell, The Lobster. Working with writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos  to build the sad-sack bachelor David, the protagonist of the dystopian love story The Lobster, Colin Farrell was given a mantra of sorts: “(Lanthimos) mentioned the word soft and I just got softer and softer and softer”, he told us in Cannes.

Call Me Thief is the debut feature by South African director Daryne Joshua. The screenplay is based on the true story of John W.

Divines, directed by Houda Benyamina, France. Meet Dounia, a petite tough and brash mixed race teenager from the eastern Parisian suburbs.

Kubo And The Two Strings, directed by Travis Knight. A boy with extraordinary powers goes on an epic quest to find his late father’s armor and vanquish an evil spirit.

Dev Patel, 26, a British actor raised in London by immigrant Indian parents born in Kenya, was a regular in the TV series Skins (2006-2007) co-starring Nicholas Hoult, when he was cast by director Danny Boyle in Slumdog Millionaire (2008) at age 17, as a poor boy from Mumbai who wins a game show and the love of a girl (played by newcomer Freida Pinto). He started acting as a child, as a way to channel his energy, “I was a naughty kid”, he told the HFPA also saying he practiced karate and Tae Kwon Do, because the “discipline helped me.