As we draw past the halfway point in what is shaping up to be one of the strongest London Film Festival programmes of the artistic director Sandra Hebron’s tenure, the quality shows no sign of tailing off.

The second week kicks off with the Times gala screening of the outstanding Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. James Mangold’s film follows the traditional music bio formula (childhood trauma, substance abuse, conquered demons) but infuses it with a spirit and unassailable coolness that leaves Ray for dust. Without doubt this is one of the films of the year.

Robert Downey Jr seems to have triumphed over his own much-publicised habits to turn in his best performance for a long while in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. This cine-literate black comedy is a return too for screenwriter Shane (Lethal Weapon) Black, who makes his directorial debut after nearly a decade away from the film business. A knowing thriller full of Hollywood in-jokes, this is a perfect film for movie-buff festival audiences who’ll pick up on all the insider references.

Downey also appears in another highlight of the festival, the closing night movie Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s second picture as a director. Shot in stylish black and white, the film is a taut political thriller set in McCarthy-era America. Reports from Venice, where it picked up the Best Actor and Screenplay awards, suggest that this is not to be missed.

Terry Gilliam’s typically idiosyncratic take on the story of The Brothers Grimm is the Sky Movies gala screening. Gilliam’s taste for all things Gothic is well-served by the material, which imagines the fairytale authors (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger) as a pair of conmen who use tales of trolls and witches to trick villagers into paying them to dispatch the “menaces” that lurk in the woods. Like all good fairytales, it is almost too creepy for children, who will either scream the cinema down or love every minute of it all.

More grown-up options include one of my favourites from Cannes this year. Three Times, by the Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou, is elegiac and mournfully lovely. Three fleeting glimpses of love affairs from three different periods are told, using the same two staggeringly photogenic actors, Shu Qi and Chen Chang. A bittersweet portrait of snatched moments of happiness and transient love, the film is captivating.

Another Cannes alumnus is Keane, an unsettling and claustrophobic film featuring a devastatingly brilliant performance from the British actor Damian Lewis. Lewis plays a deeply troubled young man struggling to come to terms with the fact that his daughter was abducted while in his care. Now he haunts the New York train station where it happened, but finds no answers to the questions that run through his mind on auto-loop. The director Lodge Kerrigan’s camera is so close to Lewis’s face it’s as if he’s trying to climb into his head, which is not a comfortable place to be. A remarkable, albeit harrowing, film.

One final treat for festival audiences is the Times Screen Talk with the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal. He’ll be discussing his role in The King, a piece of Southern Gothic that uses Bernal’s charisma to chilling effect. It promises to be an interesting event — Bernal is an engaging and funny interviewee — although, to be honest, he could talk about loft insulation and we’d still hang on his every word.

LFF tickets can be booked via 0207 960 2111 or www.timesonline.co.uk/lff

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