With the Edinburgh International Film Festival turning 60 this year, the celebs have come to town. Charlize Theron, Sigourney Weaver and Steven Soderbergh will all be dropping in for onstage events, Sean Connery will host a gala and the director Kevin Smith will talk about the eagerly awaited Clerks II. The interview sold out almost immediately and festival organisers are expecting a repeat of last year’s ticket frenzy for the interview with the Buffy creator Joss Whedon. Seats sold on eBay then for up to £400.

The festival also acknowledges its birthday celebrations in its choice of closing night film — Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out is a British masterpiece made in the year the festival began.

But the festival director Shane Danielsen and his team have tried not to let the celebrations distract them from the main aim of the festival — championing new cinema and discovering fresh talent. The programming requires a leap of faith, because if you have heard of more than 25 per cent of the films being shown, the organisers haven’t been doing their jobs properly. This is not the film festival for those who want to catch the year’s big releases a month or so before everyone else. Edinburgh is for movie buffs who want to learn something new about world cinema, who want to catch the minor masterpieces that present too much of a risk for distributors and otherwise run the risk of disappearing unseen.

That said, the 2006 festival also has a rather tasty haul of buzz movies, the kind of hotly anticipated cult flicks that keep internet chat rooms busy for months. With the inclusion of a retrospective of one of the most influential periods of modern filmmaking — American cinema of the 1970s — there is as much here for the hipster audience as for the full-time cinéaste.

The hottest ticket so far has been for Clerks II, Kevin Smith’s gloriously foul-mouthed return to form after the wilderness years of Jersey Girl. Dante and Randal have graduated from their convenience store to a burger joint, and from black-and-white to colour, but thankfully the scabrous, irreverent humour remains.

Art School Confidential heralds the reunion of the Ghost World team, the director Terry Zwigoff and the cartoonist/screenwriter Daniel Clowes, and is a must-see for fans of the low-key wit of their first collaboration. The film, starring John Malkovich, skewers the pretensions of the art world and flings a serial killer into the mix.

Malkovich also stars in Colour Me Kubrick, a British film that tells the extraordinary story of Alan Conway, a conman who spent the best part of a decade masquerading as the reclusive director Stanley Kubrick. Malkovich’s performance in this “true- ish story” is apparently outstanding.

Another film with an impressive pedigree is Jindabyne, Ray Lawrence’s mature, enigmatic and troubling follow-up to the terrific Australian psychodrama Lantana. The formula is much the same — simmering shame and guilt in a small town, and performances so powerful they grab you by the throat. Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne are particularly strong.

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe follow their documentary success Lost In La Mancha with a real oddity. Brothers of the Head is a mockumentary about a fictional 1970s rock band featuring a pair of Siamese twins. Despite its bizarre subject matter, the film is grittily convincing, genuinely moving and heading for cult status.

One of the more unexpected hits at Cannes this year was The Host, an exuberant, anarchic and very funny Korean take on the Japanese monster movie tradition. After a load of toxic chemicals is dumped in Seoul’s Han River, something angry, destructive and ravenous crawls out. One family stands together to try to fight it.

An environmental message of a more direct kind comes in An Inconvenient Truth, a powerful account of the former Vice-President Al Gore’s one-man mission to raise the world’s awareness of global warming. Charismatic, persuasive and tireless, Gore wins over one audience at a time on his roadshow. You can’t help mourning this principled and intelligent man’s failure to gain the Presidency.

Robin Williams always gives his best performances in more subdued roles — it’s just a pity that he takes them so infrequently. A film that promises a refreshing break from Williams’s trademark scenery chewing is The Night Listener, an Armistead Maupin adaptation in which Williams plays a radio talk-show host who strikes up a friendship with a teenage fan. The fan, however, is not quite what he seems.

A cool cast (Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon, Tom Waits) and a mordantly funny premise make Wristcutters: A Love Story a feature debut to look out for. Fugit plays a lovesick young pup who ends it all over his lost girl, only to find himself in a suicidal afterlife that is even worse than the real world. A surreal road trip and a bittersweet romance ensue.

One of the most intriguing films I have seen so far is Madeinusa, which could be described as a kind of Peruvian backwoods take on The Wicker Man. Madeinusa lives with her jealous sister and predatory father in abject poverty. Her isolated mountain community celebrates a yearly festival that blends pagan superstition with ritualistic Catholicism — for 48 hours God is believed to be dead and thus unable to see the sins of the people. A stranger arrives en route from Lima. The connection between him and Madeinusa is instantaneous — and catastrophic.

Edinburgh International Film Festival, Aug 14-27 (www.edfilmfest.org.uk)