Forest Whitaker has long impressed audiences with his nuanced acting skills, often as gentle giants in films like Good Morning, Vietnam and The Crying Game. But in The Last King of Scotland, he puts on a completely different mask as the cold-blooded and terrifying late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

Forest's performance is so fiercely sensational that pundits predict he's a shoo-in for the Oscar for Best Actor. After all, he's already snagged the Golden Globe and Screen Actor's Guild (SAG) awards for Best Actor, among a dozen other accolades.

If you didn't know, Idi Amin was a highly-decorated army officer who rose through the ranks before seizing Uganda in a military coup in 1971. His 9-year-long reign of terror saw the murder and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, to the extent that even Western powers wanted him assassinated. Amin bestowed himself the title of The Last King of Scotland, on account of his defiance against Britain.

This biopic sees the charismatic tyrant largely through the eyes of a naïve Scottish doctor (played by the yummy James McAvoy) who becomes Amin's personal physician and confidant. Even after witnessing Amin's sadistic and vengeful actions, the doctor remains in thrall of the leader's absolute power and lunacy.

Combining fact and fiction, The Last King of Scotland is searing account of how absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the most dramatic piece of cinema to be unleashed on our screens this week. Politically-inclined LGBTs — or anyone else who appreciates a potent drama — shouldn't miss this.