Lee Daniels’ The Butler—a palpable hit—ends on a muted yet inspirational up note with the election of a black man to the White House, and indeed the Barack Obama era has been a boon for movies depicting the black struggle past and near present. With the release of Fruitvale Station, 12 Years a Slave (a sensation at the Toronto International Film Festival), Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, The Butler, 42, Blue Caprice, and the upcoming Black Nativity, 2013 may go down in the scriptures as the greatest year for black actors, directors, and themes in Hollywood history. It has been a banner year for black male actors in particular, from proven qualities such as Forest Whitaker (The Butler), Isaiah Washington (Blue Caprice), and Idris Elba (as Nelson Mandela) to fresh revelations such as Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave), Chadwick Boseman (as Jackie Robinson in 42), and Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station), Academy Award contenders all. Next year the Oscars may have a whole deeper hue.

Much of the power in these performances comes from the compressed force of what the characters dare not say or do, under penalty of pain or death. In these often harrowing accounts of slavery, apartheid, segregation, and police brutality, “Don’t make the white man mad” is the warning label sewn into the consciousness of every black child as soon as he or she is able to toddle upright. Patronized and demeaned as “boy” long into manhood, the black male especially learns early on to mask his emotions and rein in his impulses, otherwise down comes the lash, up goes the lynch rope. The opening tableau of The Butler shows two young black men hanging from nooses as Old Glory flutters from a flagpole in the background like an ironic mockery of Superman’s “truth, justice, and the American way.” The slaves, sharecroppers, civil-rights activists, and disenfranchised in The Butler, Mandela, and 12 Years a Slave are subject to eruptions of cruelty and humiliation that are arbitrary, spasmodic, always hovering in the humid air, and yet systemic, institutionalized, prison-barred. In 12 Years a Slave, adapted by screenwriter John Ridley and director Steve McQueen from the 1853 memoir of its protagonist, Solomon Northup (in the title role, Chiwetel Ejiofor is sure to have a mortal lock on a best-actor nod) is a freeman who is kidnapped and sold into brutal slavery, his legal status meaning nothing in this protracted nightmare.

‘Don’t you lose your temper with that man,” the young protagonist, Cecil, is cautioned by his father in The Butler. “It’s his world; we jus’ livin’ in it.” Cecil’s father doesn’t live in it very long, shot in the head in the cotton fields by the viciously imperious young plantation master, and later Cecil’s surrogate father and mentor in butlering—played by Clarence Williams III, who earned forever-cool status as Linc on The Mod Squad “Solid”)—instructs him in the art of being inconspicuous, innocuous. “Never let them see you lose your temper” is also the advice clamped on Idris Elba’s Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (a lesson Barack Obama incorporated early), and Chadwick Boseman’s Jackie Robinson in 42 is chosen by Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford, enjoying his codger-dom) to break major-league baseball’s color barrier in 1947 precisely because he has the fortitude to holster his temper and visor his anger, no matter how much he’s baited by opposing players or southern bigots all jacked up on Yoo-hoo. The coiled physicality of Boseman’s performance parts the waves of fan and press attention even as his Jackie Robinson rations each terse comment as if tearing off a ticket stub. In The Butler, Cecil and his fellow white-gloved servers at the White House learn to survive as double agents, showing one face in white society—a placid face that blends into the background—and saving the real face for off-hours among fellow blacks. The only black player in a white clubhouse, Jackie Robinson has no other men to share his real face with apart from a black reporter who seems less of a kindred spirit than a narrative convenience.

Neutralizing oneself can result in neutering oneself, and Whitaker’s Cecil practices an art of self-effacement which causes him to recede into himself as he ages, as if the air were slowly leaking out. “The room should feel empty when you’re in it,” he’s instructed the first day on the job, and after decades of holy-ghosting he recognizes the hollowness of White House rituals, the grand charade. However, any notion that The Butler will be a poignant study of noble renunciation—The Remains of the Day with a revolving set of presidents (Alan Rickman’s Reagan ambles like a giant piece of Halloween candy)—is upended when we get our first close-up of Oprah Winfrey as Cecil’s wife, savoring the sultry most out of the cigarette she’s smoking and lolling in her dressing gown as if primed for a black revival of BUtterfield 8, and why not? She smiles as if she ate the cat that ate the canary. Never more domestic-queenly, Winfrey is the movie’s true power generator, and the electric-boogaloo sight of her grooving in front of the TV to an episode of Soul Train is like watching a milk shake make itself. Something similar happens in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, where the creators were intent on rescuing their protagonist from the hero wing of Madame Tussauds and bending his halo a bit, showing that before his image solidified into a static, stoic grandfatherly figure and worldwide symbol of freedom he was a dynamic, charismatic young man of action—a boxer, smooth dancer, dandy dresser, straying husband, and revolutionary fighter, a broad-shouldered container of destiny. And Idris Elba (who endowed the drug lord Russell “Stringer” Bell in HBO’s The Wire with a Miltonic majesty of street presence) carries it off splendidly, inheriting the Voice of God sonorities from Morgan Freeman that Freeman inherited from James Earl Jones and inflecting them with Mandela’s sly, melodic singsong. But it’s Nelson Mandela’s wife, Winnie, played by Naomie Harris, who unleashes the movie’s keenest flash of lightning. Having suffered an incarceration even crueler and more isolated than her husband’s (torn from her children, she spent 18 months in solitary confinement), Winnie emerges as a righteous revolutionary leader on her own, greeting and rallying her followers by snapping a Black Power salute that made the hair on the back of my neck go Whoa. It’s as if she were seizing temporary command of the movie until it resumes its long walk to freedom (and I do mean long—two and a half hours). A fiery wrath is upon her and ready to be hung around the necks of enemies and informants in retribution. In this Sweeping Epic (Gandhi-size crowd scenes) and tribute to the Indomitable Spirit of Man (to borrow a Pauline Kael–ism), Harris taps into something more primal and Martha Graham–ish, the fierce mother force who will not be denied.