Ten brilliant films to book now at the 2015 London Film Festival

This wonderfully loopy story about a society in which people get turned into animals if they don’t find a soulmate is the Time Out gala film at the festival, and the first English-language film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (‘Dogtooth’). See it with a date – or risk being turned into a flamingo!

Screens at the LFF on Oct 13 and 15. Opens in cinemas on Oct 16.

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‘Evolution’, the long-awaited second film from French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović (‘Innocence’). It imagines a remote island inhabited only by women and young boys.

If you don’t know the name Brie Larson, you soon will. The 25-year-old American actress is making a big splash with survival drama ‘Room’ (an adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel), in which she stars as a woman who has been trapped in a garden shed for seven years after being kidnapped and raped, and is now living with her five-year-old son.

Screens at the LFF Sun Oct 11 and Tue Oct 13. Opens in cinemas on Jan 29 2016.

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‘The Wave’, a terrifying Norwegian tsunami thriller in which a geologist must save his family from disaster.

Who are these harmless old men living together in an end-of-the-line Chilean seaside town? It turns out they’ve been put there by the Catholic church and they’re not so harmless. Director Pablo Larraín sticks the knife into institutional hypocrisy and corruption with this wry, dark tale.

Screens at the LFF on Thu Oct 8 and Fri Oct 9. Opens in cinemas on Mar 25 2016.

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‘The Pearl Button’, a doc that also digs into the dark underside of Chilean history.

If you thought that this film about the window-smashing feminists was going to be one of those nice sugarcoated English period dramas, think again. Starring Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep, this is raw, real and relevant to sexism today.

Screens at the LFF Wed Oct 7 and Thu Oct 8. Opens in cinemas on Oct 12.

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‘He Named Me Malala’, a fly-on-the-wall doc following another feminist heroine, teenage Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara give exquisite performances in this beautiful and moving adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel about tentative lovers defying the conservative values of 1950s America. It’s rare to find a film both so delicately crafted and so emotionally truthful.

Screens at the LFF Wed Oct 14 and Sat Oct 17. Opens in cinemas on Nov 27.

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‘Sunset Song’, Terence Davies’s film of a 1932 novel of romance and suffering in rural Scotland. Stars Agyness Deyn and Peter Mullan.

Welcome to hell on Earth as Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes plunges us into a day and a night in Auschwitz, sticking close to one prisoner who is working for his Nazi captors and searching for a rabbi to perform burial rites on his dead son. Harrowing doesn’t cut it.

Screens at the LFF on Sat Oct 10 and Sun Oct 11. Opens in cinemas on Apr 1 2016.

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‘Beasts of No Nation’, which stars Idris Elba as a warlord leading a troop of child soldiers in an unnamed African country.

Michael Fassbender channels all that charismatic, hypnotic energy into playing the Apple co-founder and geek hero. The film’s writer is Aaron Sorkin, the man behind ‘The Social Network’, and word is (as with Mark Zuckerberg in that film) we get to see more than a bit of Jobs’s obnoxious streak.

Screens at the LFF on Oct 18. Opens in cinemas on Nov 13.

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‘Trumbo’, a biopic starring Bryan Cranston (aka Walter White from ‘Breaking Bad’) as Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter jailed and blacklisted in Hollywood for his left-wing politics in the 1940s.

This German film was filmed in one shot – yes, one single shot (unlike ‘Birdman’, which only pretends to be). It’s a heart-stopping heist thriller that runs all over modern-day Berlin as an unsuspecting young clubber falls in with a lively bunch of guys. Totally thrilling.

Screens at the LFF on Fri Oct 16 and Sat Oct 17. Opens in cinemas on Apr 29 2016.

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‘Dheepan’, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. It’s from French filmmaker Jacques Audiard (‘A Prophet’) and tells of Sri Lankan refugees who leave one war behind only to endure another in the Paris suburbs.

Legendary actor Marlon Brando (‘The Godfather’) sort-of narrates this doc from beyond the grave. Director Stevan Riley draws together archive footage and film clips and cleverly uses recordings of Brando’s own voice, taped shortly before his death in 2004, as he muses on his life and career. It’s weirdly gripping.

Screens at the LFF on Oct 11 and 13. Opens in cinemas on Oct 23.

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‘Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans’ is another doc about a mid-century American icon. It’s the story of how the actor crashed and burned trying to make the ultimate racing-car movie.

Ben Wheatley is the British director behind brilliant low-budget films like ‘Kill List’ and ‘Sightseers’. Now he’s got his hands on proper money to make a film of JG Ballard’s 1975 satirical novel set in a swanky towerblock in London on the brink of anarchy. We can’t wait to see what he comes up with. Tom Hiddleston and Sienna Miller star.

Screens at the LFF Oct 9 and 11. Opens in cinemas on Jan 29 2016.

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‘Youth’, another eccentric movie, starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as old friends catching up in the Alps.