The first week of The Times bfi London Film Festival has been a medley of surreal encounters and shameless fun. There’s an elegant whiff of Empire about the parties, and genuine excitement about the menu. The hard evidence is the queue for returns at every British premiere.

The reception at the Park Lane Hotel for The Constant Gardener is simmering at midnight. The stars case the ballroom like royals in a game of chess. Here comes the queen, Rachel Weisz. There goes the bishop, Ralph Fiennes, on a diagonal route to the gents. I’m not the only pawn who feels out of his depth.

Stephen Woolley, the director of Stoned, introduces me to a middle-aged Romantic called Nick Rhodes, a plump chap with bleached highlights and little to say. They are an odd couple. One of them looks like a member of Duran Duran, the other looks like Ozzy Osbourne.

Luckily we’re all fans of Woolley’s new film. Stoned is an offbeat gem, the kind of experiment that makes festivals tick. It’s loosely hinged on the final days of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. But it’s a far more powerful lament for the 1960s. Sleaze-wise, it’s spot-on. Stylistically, it’s absolutely fascinating: an homage to such films as Joseph Losey’s The Servant and Donald Cammell’s Performance.

The novel (some might argue insane) trick is that it’s shot from the perspective of Jones’s infatuated gardener (Paddy Considine), and his cynical chauffeur (David Morrissey). They are the Wallace and Gromit of Aquarian groupies, the most tragi-comic retainers in rock history.

Like most punters I’ve been stunned by some films and appalled by others. I hated Takeshi Kitano’s self-loving spoof Takeshis’, slept through Lars von Trier’s lumpen Manderlay and would happily toss Anthony Hopkins and Jake Gyllenhaal into the nearest sump after watching John Madden’s mathematical melodrama, Proof.

Pierce Brosnan shoots his career in the foot in the preposterous thriller, The Matador. But Steven Soderbergh salvages his with a stripped-to-the-bone film called Bubble, a blue-collar thriller about jealousy in a factory canteen. The observation is first-rate, the twist delicious.

I’m on a roll when I catch Lucile Chaufour’s rockabilly film, Violent Days. This grainy black and white film charts a night of scuffles in a town hall gig in Le Havre in the 1950s. The guys get greased up in the toilets and hang around the beer. The girls look like Jayne Mansfield and are studiously ignored. The plot is non-existent, the atmosphere electric.

I’m invited to lunch by Mark Dornford-May, the director of U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, the winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin. His version of Bizet’s opera set in a South African township is a piece of art-house genius. I doubt Carmen has ever been more rudely interfered with.

Pauline Malefone is the magnetic siren who inspires the local police to sing lines like “all we’ve got to do is check out the girls, and rate their butts”. She reminds me about the time I was mugged in Lisbon when I reviewed Dornford-May’s epic staging of the Mystery Plays.

It's exactly at this moment, over a couple of sprigs of asparagus, that I realise how tenuous my grip is on this festival, and how easy it is to slip into a twilight zone. On spooky cue, Alan Rickman appears, followed by Stephen Daldry and James Lomas, the 14-year-old star of the stage musical of Billy Elliot. Two hours later I’m interviewing Daldry on stage in front of a packed audience in the Curzon Soho. I’m not entirely sure how or why.

This is the addictive pleasure of festivals. They crunch or defy expectation on an hourly basis. The best is yet to come.

Close-up and personal: London Film Festival talks

SHANE BLACK (Oct 29, NFT1) The screenwriter has turned director for the darkly comic Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

GAEL GARCIA BERNAL (Oct 30, NFT1) The star of The Motorcyle Diaries discusses his latest film, The King.

ALWIN KUCHLER (Oct 30, NFT2) A masterclass with one of this country’s leading cinematographers.

TERRY GILLIAM (Nov 1, NFT1) The maverick director is back with another dark fantasy, The Brothers Grimm.

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