The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival

Set in the aftermath of 2004's tsunami on Thailand's south coast: an architect from Bangkok has an affair with a hotel manager and offends the still-grieving locals.

A brother and sister build a house in a remote section of the Danube in this superbly photographed tale of incestuous passions.

Philippe Grandrieux presents a haunting new work, a snowbound landscape drama set in a world of stillness and near-silence.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's great new film is what the Japanese call a home drama, revealing everything that unites and divides one particular family in one 24-hour time-frame without a shred of melodrama or sentimentality.

Two friends from the countryside set off to the big city with an injured cow for company in this Iranian road movie.

Wise and deliciously witty, Ryosuke Hashiguchi's film chronicles eight years of a marriage: a husband becomes a courtroom artist while his wife nearly has a breakdown.

Francis Pasion's debut feature, sparked by a real-life murder, combines a lacerating satire of the ethics of reality TV with a cautionary account of the marketability of images of third world poverty.

Satoko Yokohama's debut stars the misfit of the year: an 16-year-old girl nicknamed Gorilla Man grappling with an unsympathetic boss, a singing contest and her dying father.

Part-fiction, part-documentary, this beguiling film from seventysomething Spanish director Pere Portabella offers an intelligent and witty treatment of Bach's legacy.

A suitably slack and airy-cool documentary about the Lower East Side artists of early-90s New York – Harmony Korine now the best-known among them – before they got pulled into the mainstream.

Beautiful Losers director discusses the themes of artistic vision and integrity raised in his film.

A bleak and poetic tale of a Moscow pickpocket and his friendship with a 12-year-old accomplice.

Two Russian soldiers capture a Chechen in this adaptation of Vladimir Makanin's unusual story of war in the Caucasus.

Already a huge sleeper hit in the US, a beautifully nuanced story of a thirtysomething finally coming of age, and a personal and poetic tribute to New York bohemia.

A Western spoof from India: the tale of a cowboy from south India who fights to protect the lives of cows and comes up against McDosa, a no-good fast-food chain.

Sandro Aguilar's haunting, formally ambitious debut immerses the viewer in a series of uncanny scenes and signals the arrival of a striking new talent.

Mike Figgis' latest digital experiment, a study of desire and moral boundaries set against the backdrop of the Gumball 3000 rally.

Stylish and unsettling, a French adaptation of John Cheever's suburban-dystopia novel Bullet Park, starring Jean-Marc Barr.

Indonesian master Garin Nugroho interweaves three stories about women, births and deaths in Bali.

A voyage through a Lebanese underworld, named for Rossellini's Rome Open City.

A Catalan retelling of the three wise men's journey to see the newborn baby Jesus.