“There’s not much more I can do in action apart from explode,” says Sylvester Stallone with a grin on his face on being asked about the next step in his career. Following a video montage of the sweaty, musclebound action heroes Stallone is adored for (minus any clips from Rhinestone, his musical collaboration with Dolly Parton), a jolly and reflective Stallone took to the London Palladium stage in sharp suit full of sage advice and revelations about his writing process.

There’s a wealth of stories in Exposed: Beyond Burlesque, a highly articulate, visually flamboyant and finally moving documentary journey around the wilder edges of the performance genre. Director Beth B, a veteran of New York’s experimental film world, followed her eight subjects over the course of some years, and allows each of them to speak for themselves with full honesty and considerable humour, while at the same time creating a fluid picture of this “immediate, honest and sometimes brutal art form,” as British artist Mat Fraser describes it.

Some films quite rightly have awards glory etched into their DNA, and when the admirably uncompromising Steve McQueen announced that his next project, focussing on the subject of slavery, would feature that cast, only a fool would have bet against it collecting armfuls of prizes. Moreover, the brutality and societal impact of slavery has seldom been seen on screen; thus in the words of its director, 12 Years a Slave fills "a hole in the canvass of cinema".

Based on the memoir by Solomon Northup (as told to David Wilson) and adapted for the screen by John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave sees an affluent black American – a violinist and family man born free in New York state - pitched into a waking nightmare when he's kidnapped by slavers in 1841. After a night of indulgence during which he's seemingly courted by admirers of his musicianship, Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) awakens screaming in bondage before he's shipped to the south, as mere cargo, and sold to the first of several masters.

Most memorably and extensively, the film documents Solomon's suffering at the hands of Edwin Epps, a drunken brute played with extraordinary ferocity by Michael Fassbender. Epps is a vile but utterly credible beast: a man riddled with self-hate whose explosive lust for the enslaved Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o, pictured above right) leads to him sideline his wife (Sarah Paulson). Patsey is the reluctant object of his affection and, as a result of the conflict this stirs up in him, she's also the victim of his worst cruelty.

The London-born McQueen (a former Turner Prize winning artist) has an exemplary directorial track record, having brought his talent strikingly to bear on the story of IRA martyr Bobby Sands in Hunger and on the subject of sex addiction in Shame - both of which were huge critical smashes and both of which starred Fassbender (McQueen and his muse Fassbender are pictured together below left). Whereas previously his films have been defiantly, dynamically art-house - sometimes so quietly contemplative they border on the spare - 12 Years a Slave is passionate and direct: there's no room for ambiguity here. And yet there's commonality: a marriage of sensitivity to character with fearlessness regarding controversial content; and, all three of McQueen's films have dealt in incarceration of a kind - the inhabitants of the Maze in Hunger, a man imprisoned by his own addiction in Shame and now a man caught in the shackles of slavery.

12 Years a Slave is a true horror story which rages at the obvious injustice of slavery and the horrendous hardships suffered by slaves themselves but, perhaps most remarkably, through Epps and those like him, McQueen draws out the complex reactions of white plantation owners and workers. It shows the detrimental impact of slavery on all those it touches, not just the people it subjugates. It illustrates how society at large is poisoned, how those who keep slaves are rendered crueller and lesser, tortured by both their own capacity for sadism and their inescapable humanity, and how few had the courage to challenge the miserable status quo.

As Epps, Fassbender does the near-impossible by making a man of such brutality not sympathetic exactly but certainly painfully human, laying bare his internal torture. He's an actor who seems to give himself over entirely to his roles and while Ejiofor is remarkable, holding us close on his horrifying journey, what Fassbender does with his character is nothing short of miraculous. And while 12 Years a Slave provides ample meat for its established actors (Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti and Brad Pitt feature memorably), it also helps shape a star in Nyong'o (making her film debut) who is heart-wrenchingly real as the terrorised Patsey.

12 Years a Slave isn't just expertly executed; its source material was shrewdly selected (by McQueen's partner, the cultural critic Bianca Stigter). By choosing to focus on a true story, what unfolds is rendered all the more powerful. Furthermore, Solomon's previous status as a free man, seemingly oblivious to life's worst cruelties, will make it easier for modern, affluent audiences to project themselves onto his character. That's not to play down the film's less commercial achievements, as this could hardly be described as slavery-lite. 12 Years a Slave is a film of searing sincerity and insight, whose central characters are drawn with real complexity. McQueen's third film doesn't just slide slavery under the microscope, it holds it there.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for 12 Years a Slave

The agony of war and of surviving it almost destroyed Eric Lomax. A British POW after the fall of Singapore who was put to work by the Japanese on the Burma Railway, he suffered brutal and prolonged torture, trauma he dealt with in subsequent decades by sealing it inside him, and plotting revenge on his abusers as he fell into troubled sleep. Lomax’s memoir The Railway Man describes this and the reconciliation with one of his captors which finally defined his life.

The week after Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Jonathan Teplitzky’s film again shows a man’s extraordinary capacity for forgiveness. It also goes further than The Bridge Over the River Kwai, which Lomax thought sanitised, in indicating the relentless savagery which he forgave.

Casting Colin Firth as Lomax is the film’s great coup. Its producers wanted an actor who doesn’t quite exist anymore, someone like the deeply moving Robert Donat, whose quiet decency, dignity and humour exemplified Britain’s wartime ideal (and which Alec Guinness’s Kwai officer tragically perverted). After The King’s Speech, the more substantial wartime sacrifice of this hero combines Firth’s own instinct for tasteful reserve with his capacity for naked emotion.

As Canadian nurse Patti Wallace, Nicole Kidman thinks she is meeting a repressed British gentleman in her own Brief Encounter when she starts talking to Lomax on a train in 1980, and they swiftly marry. When Lomax writhes and screams with nightmares on the bedroom floor, and his retreat into himself brutally consumes their marriage, she realises stiff upper lips can snap and scar (a Lomax nightmare of being back in the camp is pictured above).

The initially charming Firth-Kidman romance (pictured left), and Kidman’s part in the film, are soon subsidiary to an extensive wartime flashback, first teased out of Stellan Skarsgaard’s fellow veteran. Jeremy Irvine matches Firth as the bespectacled, 21-year-old Lomax, a rail enthusiast thrust into horror far from his Scottish home. He rigs a radio to keep spirits up with news of the war’s changing fortunes, as the POWs chip a 250-mile rail line out of towering rock and jungle with picks and spades, in shocking heat and humidity. Over 9,000 British and Australian soldiers died doing so, and over 80,000 local workers. The British Empire also used “native” labour to carve out Asian railways, and the moral murk of a war between competing colonial powers is indicated in a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson. But the degree of ruthlessness of the Japanese, and the innocence of Lomax after the radio is discovered and his long torture begins, is unanswerable.

The Railway Man is uneven in tone and takes great dramatic liberties, creating a climax in which Lomax not only confronts his interrogator Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada) at the Death Railway tourist site where he works in the film’s present, but cages and means to kill him (unlikely to be encouraged when the BBC filmed the actual meeting in 1993). These heightened dramatic leaps are justified because, like every performance and especially Firth’s, they serve Eric Lomax’s extraordinary story.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Railway Man