The Times BFI London Film Festival always excels itself where foreign-language cinema is concerned and the French Revolutions strand at the 52nd edition is particularly strong. Agnes Jaoui's impeccable comedy of political, domestic and cinematic manners, Let's Talk About the Rain, is the standout. But Laurent Cantet's Palme d'or winner, The Class, and Arnaud Desplechin's sophisticated family soap, A Christmas Tale, are also exceptional, and while there's much to enjoy in Marc Fitoussi's backstage romp, La Vie d'artiste, it's impossible not to be moved by the plight of the farmers going to the wall in Raymond Depardon's Modern Life.

For the first time in many years, the Italian contribution is equally impressive. Savaging former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo is one of the most audacious pieces of political biography to reach the screen. But it's the quieter observations of Antonello Grimaldi's Quiet Chaos, in which Nanni Moretti is superb as a newly widowed father, Gianni di Gregorio's late-life charmer, Mid-Afternoon Lunch, and Federico Bondi's upstairs/downstairs odyssey Black Sea that linger longest. The best Spanish offerings are similarly measured, with Jesfas Ponce and Pere Vila's respective slacker studies, Lazy Days and Railroad Crossing, having that assured sense of place that conveys a genuine feeling of lives being lived.

Albert Serra deliberately avoids naturalism in Birdsong, a determinedly minimalist account of the Magi's journey to visit the infant Christ, which finds an unlikely compositional companion in Sergey Dvortsevoy's captivating tale of the Kazakh steppe, Tulpan. — although this is closer in theme to a string of Eastern European films about twentysomethings at the crossroads that includes Kornl Mundruc's Delta, Lyudmil Todorov's Seamstresses and Bakur Bakuradze's Shultes.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's people-trafficking exposé, The Silence of Lorna, also fits into this category. However, its unpredictability matches it to a pair of excellent Scandinavian ensemblers, Ruben \'d6stlund's Involuntary and Eva S\'f8rhaug's Cold Lunch, as well as Andrzej Jakimowski's delightful rite of passage, Tricks, which sees Polish teenager Ewelina Walendziak teach younger brother Damian Ul how to bribe fate.

The pick of the world cinema selection is Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman's chilling animated memoir of the 1982 massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in the Lebanon, which is bound to draw comparison with Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. However, fans of the Western won't want to miss Mehrshad Karkhani's Loose Rope, Shashank Ghosh's Quick Gun Murugan, Sadik Ahmed's The Last Thakur and Kim Jee-woon's The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which respectively reinvent the genre through Iranian, Tamil, British-Bengali and South Korean eyes.

Several Asian arthouse stalwarts have pictures in LFF2008, including Indonesia's Garin Nugroho (Under the Tree), Indians Shyam Benegal (Welcome to Sajjanpur) and Ketan Mehta (Colours of Passion), China's Jia Zhangke (24 City) and the Japanese mavericks Takeshi Kitano (Achilles and the Tortoise) and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Still Walking). But a number of lesser lights make more impact, among them Aditya Assarat (whose post-tsunami romance Wonderful Town is a bittersweet gem), Ying Liang (who questions the sustainability of China's economic miracle in GFriday, Month xx, 2006ood Cats) and Shunichi Nagasaki, who teams Shirley MacLaine's daughter Sachi Parker and teenager Mayu Takahashi to enchanting effect in The Witch of the West Is Dead, which epitomises the kind of magical children's film that Hollywood has forgotten how to make.

1The highlight of the mediocre African slate is Eyes of the Sun, Ibrahim El Batout's contentious critique of contemporary Egyptian society that boasts former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali as the villain. Thankfully, the Latin America contingent is much stronger, although Pablo Trapero and Rodrigo Plé flirt with cliché and caricature in the women's prison drama Lion's Den and the 1930s family saga, The Desert Within. Restraint is the watchword, however, in Enrique Rivero's Parque Via, which features a wondrously inscrutable performance by Nolberto Coria, as he recreates his own experiences caretaking a luxury house on the outskirts of Mexico City. Totally capturing the anxiety that haunts anyone entrenched in an insulating routine, this is compelling treatise on class, servitude, loyalty and inverted snobbery.