This week the Virginia Film Festival added five new films to its line-up and one is carrying serious Oscar buzz! Those films are: Rust and Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, Quartet, The Sessions, Liv & Ingmar. Silver Linings Playbook will be the centerpiece of the film festival. It stars Bradley Cooper of the Hangover series and Jennifer Laurence of Hunger Games, so naturally this is the film that carries the Oscar buzz. Bradley Cooper stars as a struggling man trying to rebuild back his life and Jennifer Laurence is the girl that “helps” him along the way.

The closing film to the festival is The Sessions. It has some acclaim coming with it as well. Maybe a potential Oscar too? It won an Audience Award and Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Acting at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. It is the story of a 38 year-old man who is paralyzed from the waist down due to polio, left in an iron lung, and trying to lose his virginity. This is definitely a subject I have never seen in a movie before!

The movie to see though, in my opinion, would be Quartet. Dustin Hoffman makes his directorial debut and Maggie Smith of Downton Abbey stars in the movie. Maggie Smith plays a diva named Jean Horton who revisits some old band mates as well as her ex-husband when she gets put in an old age home for musicians. She is forced to come to terms with the pain and damage she has done, and find out whether time can repair the damage.