Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 9/10/2014)

But, while the Official, First Feature and Documentary competitions make welcome returns, along with Experimenta and Treasures from the Archive, it is worth repeating that the majority of patrons go purchase tickets for LFF to see films because they admire the director or one of the stars, because they loved the book from which a picture has been adapted or care passionately about a cause under discussion. They don't say, `do you know what, I fancy a journey/laught/dare/debate tonight. I wonder if there's anything on at LFF that might fit the bill?' As a consequence, F&S will continue to offer geographical overviews that readers give readers a better chance to tracking down a title they might like to see than some nebulous marketing gimmick.

As always, the new British films lead the way and there is no better place to start than with the opening night gala, Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game. Adapted by first-time screenwriter Graham Moore from Wadham College mathematician Andrew Hodges's acclaimed biography of Alan Turig, this marks the English-language debut of the Norwegian director of Headhunters (2011) and should prove more satisfying to those seeking an insight into the code-breaking activities conducted at Bletchley Park during the Second World War than Michael Apted's take on Robert Harris's novel, Enigma (2001). The action opens with Turig (Benedict Cumberbatch) being interrogated by a compassionate copper (Rory Kinnear) after being arrested in 1952 for gross indecency with a 19 year-old male drifter. However, the primary focus falls on events at the Government Code and Cypher School, where the twentysomething Turig teamed with chess champion Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode) and cryptanalyst Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) to crack the Nazi wartime code for Royal Navy commander Alastair Denniston (Charles Dance) and MI6 agent Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong).

Marking the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, James Kent's adaptation of Vera Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth, receives its world premiere at LFF58. Alicia Vikander plays the free-spirited daughter of conventional Edwardian parents Dominic West and Emily Watson, whose scholarship to scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford coincided with her crush on Kit Harrington, the dashing best friend of her brother, Taron Egerton. However, when the Kaiser invades neutral Belgium, the boys volunteer for the Western Front and Vikander quickly discovers that the trenches are more about gore than glory when she enrols to become a nurse. John Boorman provides another insight into the realities of life in uniform in Queen and Country, which follows Hope and Glory (1987) in fictionalising the veteran director's own experiences. Newcomer Callum Turner headlines, as the 18 year-old called up for National Service as the Korean War rages on the other side of the world. However, while Turner enjoys the distractions provided by cinema and older woman Tamsin Egerton, he and fellow recruit Caleb Landry Jones have more to worry about in the form of growling sergeant David Thewlis and major Richard E. Grant, as they strive to teach typing to troops about to be sent overseas.

The 1950s also prove crucial to Tom Harper's War Book and Corinna McFarlane's The Silent Storm. The former is actually set in the House of Commons in the present day, but it centres on the tensions that arise when a government minister and several aids use a protocol written at the start of the Cold War to test the efficacy of strategies designed to maintain control in the wake of a nuclear attack. Starring Sophie Okonedo, Ben Chaplin, Kerry Fox and Antony Sher, this analysis of political arrogance and accountability has a contemporary relevance that it shares with McFarlane's fictional bow after impressing with the 2008 documentary, Three Miles North of Molkom. Set on a remote Scottish island, the story turns on the tempestuous relationship between authoritarian minister Damian Lewis and his 30 year-old wife, who finds a purpose when troubled 17 year-old Glaswegian Ross Anderson is entrusted to her care by a religious charity as part of his rehabilitation.

The scene shifts to 1969 for Carol Morley's The Falling, which follows up the extraordinary Dreams of a Life (2011) with a tale of a teenage friendship that is placed under severe strain when Florence Pugh sleeps with Maisie Williams's white magik-obsessed brother, Joe Cole, and a tragedy occurs in the midst of a mysterious outbreak of a fainting sickness at the school run by Greta Scacchi. Maxine Peake co-stars as Williams's agoraphobic and neglectful mother, while the stylised imagery is provided by the estimable Agnès Godard. Another intense female liaison comes under scrutiny in Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy, which evokes the spirit of Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) and the Euro erotica of the ensuing decade to depict the dynamic between entomologist Sidse Babett Knudsen and her housekeeper, Chiara D'Anna, who also happens to be the passive partner in the couple's ritual sado-masochist role-play. But their cosy rural idyll on the edge of a village populated entirely by women comes under pressure when D'Anna takes exception when Knudsen begins to yearn for a more conventional romance.

The setting proves every bit as crucial to Alan Rickman's A Little Chaos, which harks back to 1682 to follow the efforts of landscape architect André Le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts) to finish the gardens at the newly completed palace at Versailles on time. within budget and to the satisfaction of Louis XIV (Rickman). However, the choice of Sabine De Barra (Kate Winslet) to fashion the Rockwork Garden infuriates both Le Nôtre's wife (Helen McCrory) and the monarch's mistress, Madame de Montespan (Jennifer Ehle), as much as it intrigues the Sun King. And the clash between art and life recurs in Mike Leigh's Mr Turner, a portrait of painter Joseph Mallord William Turner that earned Timothy Spall the Best Actor prize at Cannes. Concentrating on temperament rather than talent, Leigh offers an episodic insight into the last 25 years of Turner's life, as he moved away from classical representation towards a proto-impressionism and incurred the wrath of the Royal Academy, the bemusement of fellow artists like Benjamin Robert Haydon (Martin Savage) and the dubious acclaim of such critics as John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire). However, the death of his father (Paul Jesson) causes an emotional crisis that pitches Turner between housekeeper Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), estranged mistress Sarah Danby (Ruth Sheen), Scottish polymath Mary Somerville (Lesley Manville) and Margate landlady, Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey).

If Leigh allows himself a few digs at critics who have boosted and brickbatted him over the years, Michael Winterbottom contemplates the responsibilities involved in making a film about a true story in The Face of an Angel. Adapted from the Barbie Latza Nadeau book that was inspired by the court case that followed the murder of Meredith Kercher, the action takes place in the northern Italian city ofo Siena, where Dante-obsessed director Daniel Brühl is struggling with a picture outlining the trial of an American student charged with the murder of her British housemate. Kate Beckinsale plays the journalist whose tome provided Brühl's source material, while Valerio Mastrandrea co-stars as a sinister local claiming to have inside knowledge of the case alongside Cara Delevingne, as a teenage waitress whose vulnerability reminds Brühl of the daughter at the centre of a domestic dispute back in London. Duane Hopkins serves up a very different brand of social realism in Bypass, the long-awaited follow-up to his admired debut, Better Things (2008). Centred on Gateshead teenager George McKay, the action divides into two acts a year apart. In the first, McKay shares the burden of caring for bedridden mother Arabella Arnott and truanting younger sister Lara Peake with older brother Benjamin Dilloway. But, when he is jailed for burglary, McKay has to overcome the loss of his mother and increasing ill health to pursue the criminal activity that he hopes will keep Peake on the straight and narrow.

The sole Irish representative at LFF 2014 is Tomm Moore's Song of the Sea, a hand-drawn follow-up to his Oscar-nominated debut, The Secret of Kells (2010) that draws on Celtic myth and the lore of the selkie. Abandoned suddenly by their mother, Bronagh (Lisa Hannigan), Ben (David Rawle) and his mute younger sister Saoirse are raised in a lighthouse by their father, Conor (Brendan Gleason). Saoirse learns to communicate with a shell flute that was once owned by her mother. She also becomes fascinated by a pod of seals on a nearby beach. However, when their grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) takes the children to the city, they resort to ancient magic to return to the sea so that Saoirse can fulfil her destiny.

Completing the UK roster are: Daniel Wolfe's Catch Me Daddy (in which 17 year-old Sameena Jabeen Ahmed tries to start a new life in the Yorkshire Moors with boyfriend Connor McCarron unaware that her traditional Pakistani father has dispatched her brother to fetch her home); Bryn Higgins's Elecricity (an adaptation of Ray Robinson's novel that follows epileptic Agyness Deyn from Saltburn to London to give estranged brother Christian Cooke the money he is owed from the sale of their late mother's house); Guy Myhill's The Goob (a debut set in Norfolk that charts 16 year-old Liam Walpole's efforts to protect greasy spoon-owning mother Sienna Guillory and gay waiter Oliver Kennedy from her vicious stock car-racing boyfriend, Sean Harris); Rebecca Johnson's Honeytrap (a fact-based debut that reveals how 15 year-old Jessica Sula returns to London from Trinidad and tries to win back gang leader boyfriend Lucien Laviscount by ensnaring the devoted Ntonga Mwanza); Simon Baker's Night Bus (a snapshot of London life told through a series of serious and comedic encounters); Tom Browne's Radiator (a darkly comic debut shot on a shoestring in the home of the director's parents that charts middle-aged Daniel Cerqueira's efforts to coax ageing parents Richard Johnson and Gemma Jones into tidying up their memento-cluttered Cumbrian cottage); Jon Wright's Robot Overlords (a sci-fi romp with Gillian Anderson and Ben Kingsley in the cast that joins teen Callan McAuliffe and his mates in a seaside town as they take a tilt at the robot invaders ruling housebound humanity from their Cube mother ship); Debbie Tucker Green's Second Coming (a bold debut from a lauded playwright that dwells on the reaction of Tube worker Idris Elba and wife Nadine Marshall to the news she is pregnant, even though she was told she couldn't conceive again after having 11 year-old Kai Francis Lewis); Andrew Hulme's Snow in Paradise (a directorial debut for an accomplished editor that draws on actor-scenarist Martin Askew's own experiences for its account of small-time East End criminal Frederick Schmidt turning to Islam after best friend Aymen Hamdouchi goes missing after a drug deal); and Morgan Matthews's X+Y (which sees playwright James Graham turn Matthews's 2007 Beautiful Young Minds into a drama starring Asa Butterfield as a mildly autistic teenager who blossoms away from cosseting mother Sally Hawkins when teacher Rafe Spall takes him to the Mathematical Olympiad in Taipei).

The absence of major league directors from the LFF58 programme says more about the current state of American cinema than the acuity of the festival selection panel. David Ayer is probably the biggest name on parade, even though Fury is only his fifth feature. However, residents of the Oxfordshire village of Shirburn have known all about this tank saga set in the closing months of the Second World War for many months, as a replica of a German village was erected on the land surrounding Model Farm. Doubling as executive producer, Brad.Pitt stars as the commander of a Sherman tank pressing into Germany against the retreating Wehrmacht. However, crewmates Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña and John Bernthal are struggling to come to terms with the loss of their driver buddy and rookie replacement Logan Lerman comes under extreme pressure when he makes a mistake that costs another life.

A very different kind of ordeal faces London-based journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal) in Jon Stewart's Rosewater, when he leaves his pregnant wife (Claire Foy) to return to his Iranian homeland to cover Mir-Hossein Mousavi's 2009 election bid against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Newsweek. However, after he sends footage of the ensuing street protests to the BBC, he is arrested at the home of his parents, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Haluk Bilginer, and taken to the notorious Evin Prison, where he is interrogated in an intimidating and, at times, eccentric manner by an agent he nicknames Rosewater (Kim Bodnia) because of his scent. While the host of The Daily Show makes the transition to directing with a degree of dexterity, Bennett Miller continues to burnish the reputation established with Capote (2005) and Moneyball (2011) with another fact-based story, Foxcatcher. Steve Carell is barely recognisable as Pennsylvania multi-millionaire John Eleuthère du Pont, who invited gold medallist Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) to his sprawling Liseter Hall Farm facility in Newtown Square to train for the American wrestling team destined for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Yet, while he makes a suitable fuss of the insecure champion, Du Pont is more interested in his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), who had refused his invitation to stay home with his wife Nancy (Sienna Miller) and two children.

A very different kind of ordeal faces London-based journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal) in Jon Stewart's Rosewater, when he leaves his pregnant wife (Claire Foy) to return to his Iranian homeland to cover Mir-Hossein Mousavi's 2009 election bid against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Newsweek. However, after he sends footage of the ensuing street protests to the BBC, he is arrested at the home of his parents, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Haluk Bilginer, and taken to the notorious Evin Prison, where he is interrogated in an intimidating and, at times, eccentric manner by an agent he nicknames Rosewater (Kim Bodnia) because of his scent. While the host of The Daily Show makes the transition to directing with a degree of dexterity, the debuting Peter Sattler sheds contentious light on another prisoner-gaoler relationship in Camp X-Ray, as Kristen Stewart finds she has more in common with Guantanamo Bay detainee Peyman Moaadi than such brothers-in-arms as sexist corporal Lane Garrison and their commanding officer, John Carroll Lynch. But things come to a head when Mooadi laments that he has been denied access to the last Harry Potter book.

Stewart joined the military to toughen herself up, but Reese Witherspoon opts to follow a more individual road to 1990s redemption in Jean-Marc Vallée's Wild, which has been adapted by Nick Hornby froom Cheryl Strayed's bestselling memoir. Still affected by the death of mother Laura Dern (which sent her into a tailspin that led to drug addiction and the break up of her marriage to Thomas Sadoski), Witherspoon embarks upon the Pacific Crest Trail and reflects upon her life during the three-month, 1100-mile trek from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon-Washington border. Another relationship buckles under the strain in Susanne Bier's Serena, an adaptation of a Ron Rash novel set in North Carolina during the Great Depression that marks the third teaming of Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, as the logging magnate and his wife, whose marital idyll is shattered by the news that she can't conceive and that he has a child by another woman.

The rich aroma of melodrama also percolates through Sophie Barthes's Madame Bovary, which stars Mia Wasikowska as Gustave Flaubert's doomed heroine, who quickly tires of marriage to country doctor Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) and begins to seek distractions around Yonville in the form of manipulative merchant Monsieur Lheureux (Rhys Ifans), legal clerk Léon Dupuis (Ezra Miller) and the dashing Marquis d'Andervilliers (Logan Marshall-Green). However, an equally potent threat to the Bovarys' social status comes from Homais (Paul Giamatti), the town pharmacist who persuades Charles to attempt a difficult operation on the clubfooted Hippolyte (Luke Tittensor). A disabled youth is also to the fore in Jen McGowan's directorial bow, Kelly & Cal, as the wheelchair-bound Jonny Weston affords new mom Juliette Lewis an escape from her dull suburban marriage to Josh Hopkins and an outlet for her suppressed Riot Grrrl persona. However, as she comes to rely on Weston, she discovers his mother (Margaret Colin) is not the monster he claims her to be and that mother-in-law Cybill Shepherd is less adversarial than she had suspected.

A more harmless rite of passage is limned by Michael Tully in the semi-autobiographical Ping Pong Summer, which harks back to Ocean City, Maryland in 1985 to show how mysterious neighbour Susan Sarandon helps 13 year-old loner Marcello Conte develop the table tennis skills that will enable him to get the better of bully Joseph McCaughtry, while also winning the respect of parents Lea Thompson and John Hannah, goth sister Helena Seabrook, new African-American buddy Myles Massey and pretty classmate, Emmi Shockley. A gap at the other end of the age range proves more frustrating for Kevin Kline in the debuting Israel Horovitz's adaptation of his own play, My Old Lady, which turns around the peculiar French equity custom of viager, which entitles the seller of a property to remain in situ and receive a monthly stipend from a buyer speculating on an early demise to secure a cheap purchase. Kline's recently deceased father made such a down payment on an apartment in Paris. But, much to the relief of her testy live-in daughter, Kristin Scott Thomas, 94 year-old Maggie Smith shows no sign of shuffling off her mortal coil.

The Franco-American alliance also impinges upon Ned Benson's The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby sounds as if it should be set in the Swinging Sixties. But it takes place in the present and was originally comprised of two features subtitled `Him' and `Her', which chronicled the unravelling of bereaved mother Jessica Chastain's marriage to New York bar owner James McAvoy. However, this late addition too the LFF slate appears to be the truncated re-edit of the duology (subtitled `Them'), which Harvey Weinstein ordered the debuting Benson to produce to improve its commercial odds. The supporting cast catches the eye, with Isabelle Huppert and William Hurt playing Chastain's bibulously chain-smoking violinist mother and NYU professor father and Viola Davis cameoing as her Parisian anthropology tutor, while Ciarán Hinds crops up as McAvoy's father, while Bill Hader and Nina Arianda provide some moral support as his chef buddy and a flirtatious barmaid.

There is still a chance to double up at LFF 2014, however, as Josephine Decker announces her arrival on the indie scene with Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and Butter on the Latch. The former is a `magical-realism-romcom-mumblecore-western-with-horror mixture' that begins with Joe Swanberg landing a job on the home-brewing Robert Longstreet's Kentucky cattle ranch. However, things quickly become complicated when Sophie Traub takes a shine to her father's new hand and, as the strong ale flows, she takes exception to Swanberg's wife, Kristin Slaysman, when she pays him a surprise visit. An unexpected encounter also drives Decker's atmospheric debut, which is set against a Balkan folk festival in the woods of Mendocino, California and hovers voyeuristically, as old friends Isolde Chae-Lawrence and Sarah Small reunite, only to drift almost immediately apart, as Small fixates on banjo player, Charlie Hewson.

The cause of the fissure is more socio-economic than sexuo-emotional in Ira Sachs's Love Is Strange, as painter John Lithgow and music teacher Alfred Molina are forced to sell their Manhattan apartment after the latter loses his job at a Catholic school soon after the couple formalise their 39-year relationship by getting married. Molina moves in with gap cops Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez, while Lithgow shares a bunk bed with teenager Charlie Tahan after workaholic nephew Darren Burrows and writer wife Marisa Tomei offer him sanctuary. But the newlyweds find living apart as much a trial as mentally fragile Eva Green views sharing a roof with 17 year-old daughter Shailene Woodley in Gregg Araki's adaptation of Laura Kasischke's novel, White Bird In a Blizzard. However, when Green mysteriously disappears and the cops are puzzled by Woodley's lack of concern, she is sent to therapist Angela Bassett, who uncovers the truth about her mother's loveless marriage to Christopher Meloni and Woodley's friendships with social outcasts Mark Indelicato and Gabourey Sidibe and hunk-next-door, Shiloh Fernandez.

Continuing to burnish the reputation established with Capote (2005) and Moneyball (2011), Bennett Miller stays in the 1980s for the fact-based Foxcatcher. Steve Carell is barely recognisable as Pennsylvania multi-millionaire John Eleuthère du Pont, who invited gold medallist Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) to his sprawling Liseter Hall Farm facility in Newtown Square to train for the American wrestling team destined for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Yet, while he makes a suitable fuss of the insecure champion, Du Pont is more interested in his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), who had refused his invitation to stay home with his wife Nancy (Sienna Miller) and two children. The crime has a more traditional noir feel in Belgian sophomore Michaël R Roskam's The Drop, the latest from writer Dennis Lehane that, sadly, turned out to be James Gandolfini's final feature. He plays a onetime goodfella, who now keeps his head down as the Brooklyn owned by Chechen mobster, Michael Aronov. However, when cousin Tom Hardy finds a whimpering pit bull puppy in a dustbin and nurses it back to health with emotionally scarred neighbour Noomi Rapace, he incurs the wrath of original owner Matthias Schoenaerts and discovers the dark secrets Rapace has striven so hard to bury.

Skeletons also come tumbling out of the closet in Jason Reitman's take on Chad Kultgen's novel, Men, Women & Children, an Emma Thompson-narrated ensemble piece that contemplates the pros and cons of the communication technology that has transformed modern living. Among the specimens under the microscope are unhappily married suburbanites Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt, whose 15 year-old son is involved in a sexting relationship with classmate Olivia Crocicchia, whose failed actress mother, Judy Greer, just happens to have sent inappropriate pictures of her daughter to a modelling website. By contrast, Jennifer Garner monitors every Internet transaction daughter Kaitlyn Dever makes and her sensible bookishness wins the heart of Ansel Elogort, who drives divorced father Dean Norris to distraction by spending his life playing computer games instead of fulfilling his sporting potential.

Also on view in the US section are: Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behaviour (the debuting director stars as a terse Iranian New York bisexual with a genius for upsetting lovers, parents, employers and neighbours); Justin Simien's Dear White People (a satire on Obama's post-racial America that follows Ivy League activist Tessa Thompson, as she seeks to use her campus radio show to demonstrate that it is not okay for an all-white hall of residence to have an African-American themed party); Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's Ellie Lumme (a critic turns director with this `ghost story without a ghost' revolving around mouthy 22 year-old Allison Torem's inability to shake the intense Stephen Cone after she meets him at a party); Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (a monochrome debut that accompanies hijab-wearing vampire Sheila Vand around the Iranian ghost town of Bad City, where loser Arash Marandi hopes to dupe her into solving his problems with junkie father Marshall Manesh, drug dealer Dominic Rains and prostitute Mozhan Marno); David Robert Mitchell's It Follows (a Detroit chiller in which the already paranoid Maika Monroe starts to see creepy strangers in her peripheral vision following an ill-advised tryst with Jake Weary); Carter Smith's Jamie Marks Is Dead (a reworking of Christopher Barzak's novel One for Sorrow that sees New York state track star Cameron Monaghan befriend the ghost of bullied classmate Noah Silver to escape the grimness of life with brother Ryan Munzett and their paralysed mother, Liv Tyler); Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman's L for Leisure (a soapy 16mm arthouse paean to the pleasures of shooting the intellectual breeze that follows a group of 1990s graduates on a mellow vacation); Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens's Land Ho! (a bittersweet comedy of ageing manners that joins sexist ex-Marine Earl Lynn Nelson and his impecunious Australian ex-brother-in-law, Paul Eenhoorn, on a road trip around Iceland); Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip (a sharp cultural satire that turns around angry novelist Jason Schwartzman's decision to get away from his failing relationship with Elisabeth Moss by accepting an invitation to stay at literary titan Jonathan Pryce's country retreat); Tom Green's Monsters: Dark Continent (a sequel to Gareth Edwards's 2010 sci-fi gem that shifts the action from Mexico to the Middle East, where army veteran Johnny Harris and his unit are having to patrol quarantined Infected Zones, as well as insurgents no go areas); Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Spring (a moodily romantic horror which follows Lou twentysomething Taylor Pucci to Italy to recover from the loss of his mother and to the olive farm where his passion for genetics student Nadia Hilker survives the revelation of her shape-shifting secret); Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's The Town That Dreaded Sundown (a self-reflexive update of Charles B. Pierce's 1976 cult classic that sets Texerkana teen Addison Timlin the challenge of discovering whether the notorious Phantom Killer has returned 65 years after he last struck or whether the fresh spate of `moonlight murders' is the work of a movie-mad acolyte); Jessica Oreck's The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga (a semi-animated retelling of an old Slavic myth that is retold with reference to the ideas of such intellectuals as Theodor Adorno and Bruno Bettelheim); and Damien Chazelle's Whiplash (a jazz thriller that sees conservatory band leader JK Simmons push aspiring drummer Miles Teller to his physical and psychological limits after he asks for extra tuition).

Few films can boast 18 directors, but Warwick Thornton (`Big World'), Jub Clerc (`Abbreviation'), Robert Connolly (`Aquifer'), Anthony Lucas (`Damaged Goods'), Rhys Graham (`Small Mercies'), Ashlee Page (`On Her Knees'), Tony Ayres (`Cockleshell'), Claire McCarthy (`The Turning'), Stephen Page (`Sand'), Shaun Gladwell (`Family'), Mia Wasikowska (`Long, Clear View'), Simon Stone (`Reunion'), David Wenham (`Commission'), Jonathan auf der Heide (`Fog'), Justin Kurzel (`Boner McPharlin's Moll'), Yaron Lifschitz (`Immunity') and Ian Meadows.(`Defender') take a turn each at telling a Tim Winton short story in The Turning. Opening with Marieka Walsh's animated rendition of the TS Eliot poem, `Ash Wednesday', which Winton used as a preface to his much-lauded 2005 collection of short stories, the film presents each vignette in isolation, with each running for around 10 minutes. Several turn around a character called Vic Lang, who is played by various actors along the way, in an ensemble that includes Susie Porter, Rose Byrne, Miranda Otto, John Noble, Cate Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh, Robyn Nevin, Hugo Weaving and Colin Friels.

Hugo Weaving and John Noble also put in memorable appearances in Tony Mahony and Angus Sampson's The Mule, in which the latter also stars as a footballer who is persuaded by teammate Leigh Whannell to help him smuggle heroin back from a trip to Bangkok for Noble's ruthless nightclub owner. However, Sampson gets stopped at the airport having 20 stuffed condoms and has to hope that nature doesn't take its course before defending counsel Georgina Haig has confounded the efforts of cops Weaving and Ewen Leslie to detain him for longer than seven days. And there are more wince-inducing moments in Josh Lawson's satire on Sydneysider sexual manners, The Little Death, as registered sex offender Kim Gyngell informs his new neighbours that he has moved into their street without knowing that Alan Dukes regularly takes advantage of wife Lisa McCune after slipping her one of his sleeping pills, that Damon Herriman had decided he to become an actor because his role-play sessions with Kate Mulvany have gone so well, that Kate Box gets incredible amorous each time husband Patrick Brammall sheds a tear, and that the commitment-phobic Simpson is planning to don a mask to fulfil girlfriend Bojana Novakovic's rape fantasy.

A concluding coda rather sweetly has video translation signer Erin James guide deaf caller TJ Power through a phone sex encounter with Genevieve Hegney and another unlikely liaison between the naive Brenton Thwaites and the feisty Alicia Vikander changes the mood in Julius Avery's adaptation of John Collee's heist thriller, Son of a Gun, after 19 year-old gratefully accepts the protection in prison of old lag Ewan McGregor, only to find that he has to start paying back the favour as soon as he is released. Dark deeds also abound as the scene shifts to the desert badlands of Western Australia for Kill Me Three Times, Kriv Stenders's follow-up to the admirable Red Dog (2011) that sees dentist Sullivan Stapleton and wife Teresa Palmer hire English hitman Simon Pegg to kill wealthy sister-in-law Alice Braga for the insurance money. But, as corrupt cop Bryan Brown already seems to know, she is about to ditch her worthless husband for garage mechanic Luke Hemsworth.

White laws come under the spotlight again in Charlie's Country, Rolf de Heer's third collaboration with David Gulpilil that drew on the veteran's own experiences of prison and rehab and earned him the Best Actor prize in the Un Cértain Regard strand at Cannes. As fed up with Arnhem Land pals Peter Djigirr and Peter Minygululu of discovering another aspect of their ancient lifestyle being outlawed by cop Luke Ford, Gulpilil heads out into the Northern Territories bush to reclaim his heritage by hunting, doing bark paintings and sleeping in a makeshift hut. However, freezing rain drives him to the Darwin backstreets, where he is busted along with other homeless Aboriginals for being drunk and stoned and has to suffer the indignity of having his long hair and beard shaved once he's behind bars. Things have been no better for the Maoris of New Zealand since the Aotearoa era. But, as Toa Fraser demonstrates in The Dead Lands, life on the `long white cloud' was often brutal and 16 year-old James Rolleston has to use all his courage and cunning (albeit with a little help from the visions he has of grandmother Rena Owen) when he is accused of sacrilege by interloping warrior Te Kohe Tuhaka and then has to avenge father George Henare after their peaceful tribe is wiped out in a pitiless assault.

There is only one place to start with the documentary programme at LFF58 and that is with German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. André Singer has already set the scene with the excellent Night Will Fall. But, even so, nothing can prepare viewers for the appalling images contained in this official SHAEF record of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camps at the end of the Second World War. Producer Sidney Bernstein was unable to complete the project in 1945 and the five edited reels sat in storage at the Imperial War Museum until they were released as Memory of the Camps in 1985. However, the missing reel has now been appended to this restored version that deserves to reach the widest possible audience.

Born in Tiberias in Mandated Palestine in 1929 and 1943 respectively, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were spared direct experience of the horrors of the Holocaust. But war provided many a plot for the pictures they produced during a tumultuous sojourn in Hollywood that is captured with typical vigour by Mark Hartley in Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. Following on from Not Quite Hollywood (2008) and Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010), which examined Ozploitation and Filipino B movies respectively, this appears hot on the heels of Hila Medalia's The Go-Go Boys and lists over 80 industry insiders in its chronicle of the cousins' progress from churning out populist Israeli titles to taking a tilt at Tinseltown in the company of Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, Michael Winner, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Richard Chamberlain, Sybil Danning, Sylvia Kristel and Bo Derek.

Few of these names would have been on Robert Altman's speed dial. But, as Ron Mann reveals in Altman, he shared an independent spirit with Golan and Globus, as well as a fondness for Elliott Gould. Drawing on a range of interview, location and home movie footage, this intimate memoir enlists the help of Altman's widow, sons and regular collaborators to capture the man behind the masterpieces. Starting out with his achievements as a wartime fighter pilot and an industrial film-maker, Mann recalls the early story credit on Richard Fleischer's Bodyguard (1948), his move into feature directing with The Delinquents (1957) and the long stint in television that began with two episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He also explores the struggle to impress critics and audiences alike with follow ups to such revisionist landmarks as M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973) and Nashville (1975) and considers why he enjoyed such late success with The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993) and Gosford Park (2001).

Another American maverick makes a welcome return to LFF with his first film set in London. Having profiled the workings of institutions in Paris, as well as across the United States, Frederick Wiseman comes to Trafalgar Square for National Gallery, which was filmed over 12 weeks in 2012 and not only eavesdrops on guided tours of the galleries, but also meetings of curators, administrative staff and charitable volunteers. He also observes conservationists at work and devotes as much care and attention to capturing details in the canvases that range across the history of art from the pre-Renaissance era to the Impressionists. But, as ever with Wiseman, he is also alert to the problems involved in the day-to-day running of a venue and the higher brow insights are balanced by discussions of more mundane topics like profitability, public utility and education. By contrast with this leisurely excursion, Randall Wright keeps the maxims and anecdotes coming thick and fast in Hockney, his second encounter with the Bradford-born artist after his 2003 tele-doc, David Hockney: Secret Knowledge. Making use of a fascinating home-movie archive, this is a spirited analysis of Hockney's techniques for both painting and living, which are rooted in his father's conviction that one should never care what the neighbours might think.

The author of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) would probably have agreed. However, he was yet to write this contentious tome when he spent the winter of 1921 travelling with Frieda von Richthofen. The prolific Mark Cousins follows in their footsteps in 6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia, a gleefully glorified holiday movie that casts Jarvis Cocker as the voice of `Bert' (the nickname the irrepressibly loquacious and irreverent Cousins insists using) and muses on everything from creative inspiration, Catholic ritual and fascism to the the writings of Hélène Cixous, Antonio Gramsci and Lawrence himself.

Cousins is often described as one of this country's most eclectic film-makers. But he seems to have a companion in Peter Strickland, who joins forces with Nick Fenton for Björk: Biophilia Live, a record of the 7 September 2013 concert at the Alexandra Palace in London that brought to an end the two-year, 70-date tour inspired by the distinctive Icelandic singer's eighth studio album. Initially, the film was to have been a 3-D extravaganza directed by Michel Gondry. But conflicting schedules led to Strickland and editor Fenton taking the reins and they wisely assume a watching brief, as the show opens with an introduction by David Attenborough and includes a demonstration of the solar-powered musical box known as the Scharpsichord, as well as renditions of such hits as `Crystalline', `Isobel', `Hidden Place' and `Declare Independence'

Rounding off the actuality selection are: James Marcus Haney's Austin to Boston (which follows London-based Communion acts Ben Howard, The Staves, Nathaniel Rateliff and Bear's Den across the US in the spring of 2012); Jeremiah Zagar's Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart (an assessment of the socio-cultural impact of a 1991 New England murder and the ensuing trial, which was the first to be fully televised in the United States); Laura Poitras's CITIZENFOUR (a collaborative profile with journalist Glenn Greenwald of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which forms the final part of a trilogy on the War on Terror that began with My Country, My Country and The Oath); Margaret Brown's The Great Invisible (an investigation into the disaster involving BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which left 11 workers dead and decimated the local fishing industry and eco system); David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg's The Immortalists (a comparison of the efforts of health conscious American scientist Bill Andrews and his beer-swilling British counterpart Aubrey de Grey to discover a way to delay death); Alan Hicks's Keep On Keepin On (a profile of 89 year-old trumpet legend Clark Terry - who played with Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and mentored Miles Davis and Quincy Jones - and his friendship with blind pianist Justin Kauflin, who is a third of his age); Andrew Lancaster's The Lost Aviator (a grand nephew's tribute to a pioneering aviator, who was accused of murdering American writer Haden Clarke when he began a romance with Jessie `Chubbie' Miller, Bill Lancaster's co-pilot during a 1927 record attempt to fly from Australia to Britain); Gerry Fox's Marc Quinn - Making Waves (a portrait of an artist equally at home with tattoo conventions, the Venice Biennale and the Chelsea Flower Show, not to mention Lionel Ritchie and Elizabeth II); One9's Nas: Time Is Illmatic (a chronicle of how Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones beat the racist odds in coming from New York's Queensbridge projects to record a seminal 1994 hip hop album); James Hall and Edward Lovelace's The Possibilities Are Endless (a record of how Grace Maxwell helped musician Edwyn Collins recover from the massive 2005 haemorrhagic stroke that hospitalised him for six months and cut him adrift from his career and reality); Alex Steyermark's The 78 Project Movie (a journey in the footsteps of ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax that sees sound recordist Lavinia Jones Wright record folk, gospel, Cajun and punk songs on a single microphone 1930s Presto recorder); Michael Obert's Song From the Forest (a study of New Jersey native Louis Sarno, as he takes his son Samedi on a trip to the Big Apple some 25 years after he left to immerse himself in the culture of the Central African Republic's Bayaka pygmy community); Debra Granik's Stray Dog (the director of Winter's Bone reveals the neighbourliness behind Korean and Vietnam vet Ronnie `Stray Dog' Hall's biker bravura); and Lynette Wallworth's Tender (a sensitive snapshot scored by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis that shows how a group set up at the Port Kembla Community Centre to provide a non-profit-making funeral service for the town's poorer residents copes with an imminent death among their own number).

Sadly, time prevents a more detailed discussion of the titles on offer in these cherished strands. So, we shall have to content ourselves with lists of OLDIES: Walter Summers's The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927); William A Seiter's Why Be Good (1929); Yonggang Wu's The Goddess (1934); Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (1939); John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946); George Cukor's Born Yesterday (1950); Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951); Joy Batchelor and John Halas's Animal Farm (1954); Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Guys and Dolls (1955); John Schlesinger's Far From the Madding Crowd; King Hu's Dragon Inn (both 1967); Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates (1968); Lutfi Akad's The Bride (1973); Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974); Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother (1980); Robert Altman's Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982); and Steve James's Hoop Dreams (1994) EXPERIMENTA: Tomonari Nishikawa's 45 7 Broadway; William Raban's 72-82; Naeem Mohaiemen's Afsan's Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part 2); David Leister's Blinder; Timothy Smith's Béton Brut; John Smith's Dark Light; Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy's Dog People; Julia Dogra-Brazell's From A to B; Harun Farocki's The Inextinguishable Fire; Eric Baudelaire's Letters to Max; Lewis Klahr's Mars Garden; Toby Tatum's Monsters; Gail Pickering's Near Real Time; Robbrecht Desmet's Ronse; Phil Coy's Sons of Unless and Children of Almost; Patrick Tarrant's The Take-Up; Hilary Koob-Sassen's Transcalar Investment Vehicles; Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki's Unheimlich I: Secret Dialogue; Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's The Unreliable Narrator; Emily Wardill's When You Fall Into a Trance; and Thomas Draschan's Wotruba.