While he named D. W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Max Linder, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Sergei Eisenstein's The General Line as early influences, he was also disappointed to have virtually no Portuguese filmmakers to emulate.

Film critic J. Hoberman has said "at an age when many men think of retirement, Oliveira emerged from obscurity as one of the 70s leading modernists, a peer of Straub, Syberberg and Duras.

Based on a play by Vicente Sanches, the film stars Maria de Saisset as Vanda, a woman who only falls in love with her husbands after they have died.

In the film, Benilde is a sleepwalking eighteen-year-old who mysteriously becomes impregnated and believes herself to have been chosen for immaculate conception, despite the angry and dismissive reactions of her bourgeoisie family and friends.

"[27] The film achieves this idea by including extensive narration, characters that speak their thoughts or read letters aloud and shots of written text.

[7] In addition to Francisca, Oliveira adapted six other novels or stories from author Agustina Bessa-Luís, as well as collaborated on the screenplay for the documentary Visita ou Memórias e Confissões.

The story of The Satin Slipper is about the unrequited love of sixteenth-century conquistador Don Rodrigue and nobelwoman Dona Prouheze with the backdrop of colonialism in Africa and the Americas.

This is followed by three consecutive but very different versions of the one act play: the first is a straightforward farce, the second is presented as a slapstick silent movie, and the third is performed with the dialogue read backwards.

In the film, the beautiful young Margarida (Silveira) falls in love with the mysterious Viscount of Aveleda (Cintra), while rejecting the advances of the notorious Don João (Dória).

Margarida throws herself out of their bedroom window in horror and the Viscount attempts to drink poison but rolls into the fireplace instead, singing an aria as he burns to death.

Horrified at their own cannibalism, the father and brother's decide to commit suicide until the magistrate points out that they are now the sole heirs to the Viscount's fortune.

Set in a mental institution, the film is not an adaptation of Dante Alighieri's famous work but derived from stories on the Bible, José Régio's play A Salvação do Mundo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, and Friedrich Nietzsche's Antichrist.

The film stars Mário Barroso as Branco, with actors Teresa Madruga, Luís Miguel Cintra and Diogo Dória playing both themselves and Ana Plácido, Freitas Fortuna and Dr. Edmundo Magalhães, respectively.

The film stars Luis Miguel Cintra as a blind homeless man whose only means of support in a poor neighborhood in Lisbon is his official, government issued alms box.

In the film, Malkovich plays an American writer who travels to Portugal with his wife (Deneuve) to research his theory that William Shakespeare was really Jacques Perez, a Jewish Spaniard who fled his native country to avoid the Spanish Inquisition.

The film is also based on the experiences of actor Yves Afonso, whose father had immigrated from Portugal to France and who had met his long lost relatives during a French-Portuguese co-production in 1987.

In Suzy, an aristocrat (Diogo Dória) has an affair with a beautiful young cocotte (Leonor Silveira), but social class differences prevent him from having a deep, meaningful relationship with her.

In Mãe de Um Rio, Leonor Baldaque plays a discontent small town girl who yearns for a more exotic life and seek advice from the Mother of the River (Irene Papas).

I'm Going Home (Je rentre à la maison) stars Michel Piccoli as Gilbert Valence, an aging stage actor that never achieved great success who deals with the sudden deaths of his wife, daughter and son-in-law after a car accident, turning down undignified roles in commercial TV shows and raising his nine-year-old grandson.

It is based on the 2001 novel O Princípio da Incerteza: Jóia de Família by Agustina Bessa-Luís, which won the Grand Prize from the Portuguese Writer's Association.

In the film, Leonor Baldaque plays Camila, who marries a man (Ivo Canelas) to help alleviate her family's financial difficulties instead of her boyfriend (Ricardo Trêpa).

This was followed by A Talking Picture (Um Filme Falado), starring Leonor Silveira, Filipa de Almeida, Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Irene Papas and Stefania Sandrelli in 2003.

In the film, Silveira takes her young daughter (Almeida) on a cruise to Bombay to meet her father's family and teaches her about the history of the places that they pass through along the way.

They also meet and learn about three successful women (Deneuve, Papas and Sandrelli) from certain location and have long conversations with the ship's captain (Malkovich), often dealing with the conflicts between Christianity and Islam.

In 2004, Oliveira made The Fifth Empire (O Quinto Império – Ontem Como Hoje), a highly political film based on the play El-Rey Sebastião by José Régio.

"[51] In the film, King Sebastian (Ricardo Trêpa) contemplates pursuing his crusade in the Middle East that would lead to the Battle of Alcácer Quibir (where he would eventually die) and the counsel that he seeks from a variety of advisors, friends and family members.

[55] In the film, Séverine reluctantly agrees to see Henri for the first time in forty years out of curiosity to know if her former blackmailer told her dying husband about her secret life as a prostitute.

The film stars Michael Lonsdale, Jeanne Moreau, Claudia Cardinale, Leonor Silveira, Ricardo Trêpa and Luís Miguel Cintra and is based on the play The Hunchback and His Shadow by Raul Brandão.

[60] Oliveira originally intended to shoot the film on a studio set, but because of his failing health it was shot in a garden close to his home in Porto.

[66] On December 10, 2014, Oliveira was appointed grand officier of the French Légion d’Honneur in a ceremony conducted by France's ambassador to Portugal at the Museu da Fundação Serralves in Porto.