Painting, prison and Pasolini: our top 12 picks for the London film festival

Mr Turner Timothy Spall cannes best actor Marion Bailey — Cannes best actor Timothy Spall as the artist JMW Turner with Marion Bailey in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library

The BFI London film festival begins on 8 October — but priority booking opens today and the box-office is fully open for ticket-sales on Thursday 18 September. The LFF is always jam-packed with mouthwatering titles; this year is no exception. Here are my picks, a Delectable Dozen of choices.

Foxcatcher dir: Bennett Miller

Watch a video review of Foxcatcher and Map to the Stars

If I had to choose a single stand-out film from the festival it would have to be this superbly bizarre true-life drama, directed by Bennett Miller, which first surfaced at Cannes. Steve Carell gives the performance of his life, playing it dead straight as John DuPont, the nerdy, bullying billionaire who in the late 80s took it upon himself to coach America’s Olympic wrestling team.

• Read Peter Bradshaw’s five-star review

It Follows dir: David Robert Mitchell

Here is a sinister and unsettling cult horror movie from the director of The Myth of the American Sleepover, which has got people talking on the festival circuit this year: the story of a young girl menaced by a curse which she must somehow pass on to another victim to survive. Audiences have been thoroughly creeped out by resemblances to The Ring, and to MR James’s story Casting the Runes.

The Falling dir: Carol Morley

Carol Morley is one of Britain’s brightest new film-makers and it is a real pleasure to see her new feature premiere at the LFF, where she made such an impression with her documentary Dreams of a Life. Now she is back with a wonderful, woozy drama, based on true events, about a hysterical mass fainting episode in an English girls school — with an original new soundtrack by Tracey Thorn.

From What Is Before dir: Lav Diaz

The Filipino film director Lav Diaz doesn’t believe in skimping on running time. His recent Dostoyevkian drama Norte, The End of History was just over four hours. This movie comes in at a crisp five hours and 38 minutes. It is another spiritual, visionary drama set in a village in 1970, which is succumbing to uncanny supernatural forces. The word “immersive” is overused in criticism and yet Diaz’s work deserves it.

Wild Tales dir: Damián Szifrón

The Almodóvar brothers, Pedro and Agustín, produce this scabrous and uproariously nasty portmanteau movie, featuring six tales of black-comic savagery — satirical stories from the dark heart of Argentina. It’s weird and wonderful, sexy and freaky, and the opening sequence set on a plane is inspired.

• Read Peter Bradshaw’s review of Wild Tales

Men, Women & Children dir: Jason Reitman

Watch the trailer for Men, Women & Children

Jason Reitman, the director of Up in the Air and Juno, takes on this contemporary black comedy starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Garner about how society and family life have been entirely colonised by social media. Parents and children open themselves up to these sites the way they couldn’t to each other and family members have to discover things about each other from the internet, whose graphics crowd onto the screen.

• Read Henry Barnes’ review from Toronto

Mr Turner dir: Mike Leigh

Video interview: Timothy Spall and Mike Leigh talk about Mr Turner

Timothy Spall gives a glorious lead performance in Mike Leigh’s account of the final years in the life of JMW Turner, an artist enduring pain in his private life and his public life also, as his work was increasingly misunderstood by critics and the art establishment. A visual and dramatic tour de force.

• Read Peter Bradshaw’s five-star review

Goodbye to Language dir: Jean-Luc Godard

Watch the video review of Godard’s Goodbye to Language and Jimmy’s Hall

3D films on the Imax screen don’t usually look like this. For one night only, Jean-Luc Godard’s new movie plays at the festival — a characteristically perplexing, boisterous, mischievous piece of work, an essay-cum-drama-cum-meditation-cum-provocation about sex, love, relationships and the residue of radical ideas and attitudes from the European left. And it’s in 3D.

• Read Peter Bradshaw’s review from Cannes

The Imitation Game dir: Morten Tyldum

Is anyone owed more of an apology and a debt of thanks from the British state than Alan Turing, the pioneering genius of computer studies, the codebreaker who deciphered the Enigma machines during the second world war, but was later hounded and prosecuted for his homosexuality. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing in his movie which flashes forward from the war to his troubled private life in the 1950s and back to his childhood.

• Read Catherine Shoard’s review from Toronto

Camp X-Ray dir: Peter Sattler

Kristen Stewart stars in tensely enclosed drama, set in a place which was supposed by now to be a thing of the past. She plays Amy Cole, a young woman who challenges herself with the toughest task imaginable: signing up for military service and the war on terror, finding herself at Guantanamo Bay and then discovering she has more in common with the prisoners.

• Read Xan Brooks’ review from Sundance

Pasolini dir: Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara — the wild child, wild adult and wild middleaged man of American independent cinema — has hung in there for the long career haul as his work has gone in and out of fashion. Now he has come back into view, with a well-regarded drama inspired by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and now this wayward recreation of the final hours in the life of Pier Paolo Pasolini, as played by Willem Dafoe.

• Read Xan Brooks’ review from Venice

Timbuktu dir: Abderrahmane Sissako

With a subversive wit and charm, the Mali-born director Abderrahmane Sissako dramatises the Islamist takeover of Timbuktu in 2012 and mocks the pomposity and aggression of the militants — making a passionate case for the neglected Islamic traditions of humanity and tolerance.