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A seriously glamorous fortnight beckons, as The Times BFI London Film Festival plays host to the biggest names in Hollywood: Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Sean Penn, Laura Linney, Halle Berry, Ang Lee and more.

Between David Cronenberg’s opening film, Eastern Promises, and Wes Anderson’s closing-night film, The Darjeeling Limited, the festival will screen 184 feature films. You can go from the world premiere of the Times Gala film, Lions for Lambs, to a masterclass by David Lynch, and on to the winners of the three biggest art-house prizes: Tuya’s Marriage won the Golden Bear in Berlin; 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days won the Palme d’Or in Cannes; and Lust, Caution the Golden Lion in Venice.

Documentaries are led by Michael Moore’s attack on American health insurance, Sicko. Big-name actors are taking tentative steps as directors, including Sean Penn ( Into the Wild). Personally, I’m looking forward to the first Fido Awards for the best canine performances – not least because I’m on the jury.

Meryl Streep on politics and passion

From The French Lieutenant’s Woman to a news reporter: how does Meryl Streep get her disguises so right

• Meryl Streep got the ball rolling

Related Internet Links

• London Film Festival

Background

• London just capital for directors

• Naomi Watts wows on opening night

• Tony Leung is in the mood for lust

• Pretty boy Brad Pitt grows up

• Brothers grim

Background

• Eastern Promises

• Viggo Mortensen joins the underworld's cast

• Michael Moore's healthy scepticism

• Are you kidding?

• Laura Linney, accidental screen queen

Related Internet Links

• LFF listings

Related Links

• Viggo Mortensen joins the underworld's cast

Lions for Lambs

The Times Gala film has all the ingredients of a classic festival event: spice, glamour and punch. Robert Redford directs this high-wire thriller in which an investigative TV journalist (Meryl Streep) is fed a bombshell story by a senator (Tom Cruise) with designs on the White House. The secret information has a direct impact on two young Californian students who sign up for the war in Afghanistan and discover that the true point of combat is at fatal odds with their ideals. Unmissable, of course.

Odeon Leicester Square, Oct 22, 7.30pm; OWE2 Oct 24, 1pm

Lust, Caution (Se, Jie)

The winner of this year’s Golden Lion is an unsettling piece of art. Ang Lee’s spy thriller, set in occupied China in the 1940s, is a gripping story about the ghastly personal price paid by quislings and martyrs. Tony Leung is a Japanese collaborator who has foiled every plot to kill him. Wei Tang is an acting student recruited by the underground to ingratiate herself into his life. The poisonous paranoia of survival (Leung) and discovery (Wei) hatches the most unexpected erotic chemistry.

OWE2, Oct 20, 8pm; OWE1, Oct 23, 12.45pm

I’m Not There

Todd Haynes’s homage to Bob Dylan is the most beautifully deconstructed film about a rock and roll myth I’ve seen. Assorted Hollywood actors such as Ben Whishaw, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett are the various different face-cards of Dylan’s life. There’s an absurd brilliance about the way it hangs together. OWE2, Oct 27, 8.30pm; OWE1, Oct 29, 3pm

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

When Brad Pitt swaggers into view in 1881 dressed from head to toe in black we know we are in the presence of a superior bastard. Even Jesse’s leather-faced brother Frank (Sam Shepard) is wary of his younger sibling’s chilly charisma. Yet when Jesse is shot dead by a twisted admirer (brilliantly played by Casey Affleck), he becomes a true American hero and his vanquisher a forgotten coward.

OWE2, Oct 19, 8.30pm; OWE2, Oct 21, midday

Far North

Michelle Yeoh lives in total isolation in the Arctic with her adopted grown-up daughter (Michelle Krusiec). The older woman believes she is cursed and destined to die alone. Sean Bean is craggy and mysterious as Loki, a Russian mercenary whom the women discover half-dead on the ice. Few words are spoken. The twists are savage. The way Asif Kapadia seems to carve this parable out of the scenery is magical.

OWE2, Oct 30, 6pm; Rich Mix, Oct 31, 6.15pm

Funny Games

Michael Haneke’s remake of his 1997 Austrian shocker resettles the film in America. The story, about an affluent family terrorised by two polite young psychopaths, resonates alarmingly with the way violence is packaged and consumed in America. There are no hard reasons why Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet pitch up at Naomi Watts and Tim Roth’s lakeside summer house. It is what it is. Very frightening.

OWE1, Oct 20, 9pm; OWE2, Oct 22, 4pm

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

A stunning Romanian film by Cristian Mungiu that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The realism would be unbearable if it wasn’t such a deliciously awful story. An iron friendship between two young college students is tested beyond endurance by the need of one girl to get an instant abortion, and the other to seal the deal with a vicious and seedy backstreet quack. Laura Vasiliu and Anamaria Marinca are marvellous as the students.

OWE2, Oct 19, 6pm

A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory

Esther Robinson’s extraordinary film is a quest to discover what happened to her uncle, Danny Williams, who walked out of a family dinner in Massachusetts in 1966 and was never seen again. Thirty years later a box of 16mm film was found in Andy Warhol’s collection that offered clues to Danny’s life, along with a box of ground-breaking shorts he made of the Velvet Underground.

NFT2, Oct 22, 6.15pm; Studio, Oct 25, 7.30pm; The Velvet Underground Eat Lunch, NFT3, Oct 23, 6.30pm

A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick’s most notorious film seems indecently young (1971) to figure in Treasures from the Archives, but it’s always a joy to see a forbidden pleasure on a large screen. Kubrick, of course, banned his own film after personal threats and tabloid reports of copycat violence.

OWE1, Oct 27, 3pm; OWE2, Oct 30, 12.30pm

Zoo

No festival is complete without controversy. Robinson Devor’s film, about a man who dies of internal bleeding after being anally penetrated by a stallion, reconstructs the events with sobriety and sensitivity. Devor interviewed those directly involved, including members of the zoophile club who meet to perform with animals. Of course, some viewers might be put off their supper.

NFT1, Oct 22, 9pm; NFT1, Oct 25, 1.30pm

Editor's choice

• Burning Bush with W
• Revolution at the new Saatchi Gallery
• Boy George on sex, drugs and Amy Winehouse