Dishing out superlatives for this year's Oscar-nominated short films

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See A Lein and other award-worthy shorts on the big screen.

It's Oscar season with a whole bunch of great feature films available to watch, but what about the shorts? You're in luck as you can see those starting this week at The Magic Lantern and Kenworthy Theatre.

To mark the occasion, here's a special batch of Oscars Shorts Superlatives to highlight the best animated and live-action short films you can see (there will also be a shorts documentary program playing as well with the incisive Incident being the one that is the most essential to watch). From a tense drama about the madness of American bureaucracy to a surreal animated film about a trio of bald brothers looking to get some hair, here's what good ol' Oscar has in store for you this year.

The strange little stop-motion gem Beautiful Men plants itself somewhere between Anomalisa and an offbeat buddy comedy as it follows three bald brothers while they wait in a hotel in Istanbul for their hair transplants. If this sounds silly, it very much is, but there is also a quite surprising emotional undercurrent to the whole affair that draws you into its small-scale yet richly textured world. Laying bare its characters, both emotionally and often literally, the film is about digging deeper into their respective anxieties while still holding us at a distance. Even as some of them may get the hair they dream of, the unexpectedly humorous yet haunting emotional punch to Beautiful Men comes in seeing that the men underneath their new 'do may just remain the same.

While there is something eerily familiar to the stellar sci-fi short I'm Not a Robot, which starts as a darkly comedic joke about the terrors of online captcha security measures before becoming something oh so much more than that, it's in the execution that it hits home. Most critical to its success is that it sees an excellent Ellen Parren giving the undisputed best performance of all the nominated shorts this year as she plays a troubled music producer who begins to question everything she thought she knew about herself. Not only does the film remain consistently clever throughout as it explores this, but it also isn't afraid to throw you for a loop when you least expect it. Just be prepared for the final brutal impact it lands and lets linger through the credits.

Though it may seem like one of the more slight of the bunch at first glance, Wander to Wonder is also one of its most fun and well-crafted shorts. Taking us into what happens to a group of tiny performers who are now trapped in a studio after the creator of the children's series they starred in died, it's another stop-motion wonder that isn't afraid to get more darkly wacky. In this world, the show must go on, even if nobody is actually watching and doing so means possibly setting fire to itself in the process. It's on the shorter side, but that doesn't stop it from making the most of its time just as it may be running thin for its tiny trio.

From the moment you're dropped into A Lien, the confined but effective portrait of the casual cruelties of the American immigration system as seen through the eyes of a single family, you hardly have a moment to even catch your breath. This is what gives it a potent, yet tragic, tension as you feel the stress and anxiety in every level of the labyrinthian procedural process that takes a dark turn. It's rather explicit in what it's attempting to open your eyes to, but the way it's crafted from the tight close-ups to the suffocating sound design as everything spirals out of control and the quick, precise cuts make it impossible to look away from — and nor should you.

The longer that you sit with The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, which plays most like a shortened version of the astounding recent film A Hidden Life, the more it is that the painful power it has grabs hold of you. Based on a true story and set almost entirely on a train in Bosnia 30 years ago, it captures just how easy it is that a terrifying act of violence can be carried out as we all look on. Good thing there's no example of this happening in history over and over again.