THE STANDOUT foreign-language flick of the season, sure to scoop awards by the bucketload, Central Station effortlessly avoids any of the snags that almost always seem to attend acclaimed prizewinning foreign movies. Beautifully filmed, it manages to adopt and sustain an epic, melancholic, sweeping majesty from start to finish.

Brutally realistic, yet deeply life-affirming, the film is a portrayal of shanty-town Brazilian life, too tough to captivate a major audience through charm alone - and its enormous charm springs not from any cloying sentimentality, but from its searing illustration of humans eking out some semblance of existence on the edge of the gutter, finding grace in desperation.

It is set in Rio de Janeiro's Central Station, as foul and dangerous a kip as you might expect, and it should be compulsory viewing for any affluent Westerner who thinks they've real problems to contend with.

Station's heroine, Dora (Montenegro) is a relentlessly cynical colossus of a woman who makes a living writing letters for the city's illiterates, letters which she generally never bothers to send since they've nothing to do with her. Life's hardships have compromised her humanity somewhat, and it gets put to the test when one of her clients is killed in a car accident, leaving her bright-eyed nine-year-old son destitute and motherless.

Dora sells him to one of Rio's notorious 'children's homes' for a couple of grand, but haunted by the certain prospect that the kid will be killed and his organs sold, she mounts a kidnapping operation to recapture him, before the unlikely pair hit the road to locate the kid's father and furnish him with his wife's last letter.

Given the wrong treatment, this might easily have become a tiresome exercise in kiddy-bonding - in director Salles' hands, it unfolds into a sweeping, elegiac road movie, resonant with religious imagery (Catholicism, for whatever reason, is to be found in its most devout form in the poorest parts of Latin America). Though the acting is supremely natural, the Brazilian landscape itself is practically the star of the show, a setting almost too beautiful to bear witness to such harshness and suffering.

Station manages to brilliantly negotiate the fine tightrope between melancholy and sentimentality, and for once, the Oscar committee seem to be spot-on in their appraisal.

The best foreign film of the year? Too right.