London Film Festival 2006

The LFF hits town this week. Here's our pick of the strange, the spectacular and the simply unmissable

'Fast Food Nation'

Big names
There’s no single must-see title to grab the headlines at this year’s festival, but there are new works from major names from across the globe. The gala screenings include: ‘Fast Food Nation’, Richard Linklater’s semi-dramatised adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s burger exposé; ‘Babel’, the latest sprawling, multi-stranded collaboration between Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga; and the high-concept romcom ‘Stranger than Fiction’, starring Will Ferrell.

'Big Bang Love, Juvenile A'

It’s a strong LFF for East Asian directors, with new, highly charged features from Takashi Miike (‘Big Bang Love, Juvenile A’, a typically idiosyncratic prison love story), Tsai Ming-Liang (‘I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone’, shot in Malaysia) and Thai favourites Pen-ek Ratanaruang (‘Invisible Waves’) and Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, whose ‘Syndromes and a Century’ offers another enigmatic adventure in the realms of the sublime.

'Black Book'

On the European front, there’s the reliably provocative Paul Verhoeven (whose ‘Black Book’ draws on his childhood in the occupied Netherlands) and Lars von Trier (with the light but experimental ‘The Boss of It All’); Nanni Moretti’s Berlusconi-baiting ‘The Caiman’; ‘The Family Friend’, Paolo Sorrentino’s follow-up to ‘The Consequences of Love’; and new work from Chabrol, Svankmajer and Kaurismäki. Elsewhere look out for the latest from Mira Nair, Philip Noyce and Christopher Guest, whose ‘For Your Consideration’ may do for movie promoters what ‘Best in Show’ did for dog-fanciers.