For the last 50 years, the London Film Festival has always sought to bring its audience the best in world cinema. However, the 2006 English-language selection is as strong as it has been for many years, with the documentary and experimental strands matching the quality of the mainstream offerings. As ever, there are copious opportunities to catch previews of pictures that will be making the headlines over the next few months.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett head the cast in Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu's Babel, which uses parallel narratives to show how a seemingly isolated, random event can have global ramifications. Another gunshot is central to Emilio Estevez's Bobby, an equally intricate ensemble piece that explores the impact of the assassination of Robert F.Kennedy on those present at LA's Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968. However, fact seems closer to fiction in The Last King of Scotland, in which James McAvoy plays the personal physician to Forest Whitaker's Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator whose childlike enthusiasms masked a dangerous eccentricity.

George Reeves, who played Superman on American television in the 1950s, similarly struggled to strike a balance between fantasy and reality, as Allen Coulter demonstrates in Hollywoodland, a dark expos of the seedy side of Tinseltown, with Ben Affleck, as the highly vulnerable Man of Steel, and Adrien Brody, as the detective investigating his supposed suicide. Toby Jones also impresses in Douglas McGrath's Truman Capote biopic, Infamous, while there's another look behind the Hollywood scenes in Christopher Guest's latest lampoon, For Your Consideration, which includes Ricky Gervais in a tale of showbiz ego and artistic pretension set against the annual awards season.

Elsewhere, Kate Winslet headlines Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perrotta's simmering study of Boston suburbia, Little Children, and there's more cine-literary ingenuity on show in Richard Linklater's adaptation of Eric Schlosser's seemingly unfilmable bestseller, Fast Food Nation, and Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, in which taxman Will Ferrell discovers that he's become a character in a novel and hires academic Dustin Hoffman to prevent him from reaching an unhappy ending.

Other offbeat excursions worth taking are John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus and Bobcat Goldthwait's Sleeping Dogs Lie, which explore decidedly alternative approaches to sexual fulfilment, William Friedkin's intense interpretation of Tracy Letts's off-Broadway hit, Bug, and Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr's expansive Outback saga, Ten Canoes.

The British contingent also has its highlights, with Anthony Minghella directing Jude Law and Juliette Binoche in Breaking and Entering, a freewheeling portrait of interconnecting lives in an ever-changing London, and Shane Meadows recalling the grim realities of growing up in a 1980s coastal town whose main attractions are deprivation and violence, in This Is England. On the lighter side, Peter O'Toole and Leslie Phillips turn in cherishable performances in Roger Michell's Venus, a Hanif Kureishi-scripted study in disrupted contentment, in which a pair of veteran actors fall out over a hapless niece.

There's also plenty to smile about (and even more to wince at) in Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. But the foibles he mocks also have a sinister side, as David Leaf and John Scheinfeld reveal in The US vs John Lennon, a fascinating documentary about the ex-Beatle's battle to secure his Green Card in the face of the malign opposition of President Richard Nixon, who singularly failed to appreciate the novelty of Lennon's ironic protest stunts for peace with artist wife, Yoko Ono.

The more self-indulgent side of the avant-garde is covered in Anger Me, an astute portrait of the controversial film-maker and Hollywood chronicler, Kenneth Anger, whose best-known works, Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1963), are included in a mini-retrospective. John Maringouin's Tarnation-like study of domestic dysfunction, Running Stumbled, also stands out from the underground selection. However, Eric Steel's The Bridge is even more disconcerting, as it actually records some of the 1,300+ suicides that have occurred off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge since 1937, as well as interviewing friends and relatives of the deceased in a bid to uncover the motives for their actions.