Director: Terence Davies
Cast: Rachael Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale
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Writer-director Terence Davies takes on Terence Rattigan's play of love, obsession and infidelity for the London Film Festival's Closing Gala. It opens in post-war London with Hester Collyer (Weisz) failing to commit suicide - we're all familiar with the hassles of using a coin-operated gas meter. At this point, Davies inflicts upon the audience a dire montage of Hester's relationship with childish ex-RAF pilot Freddie Page (Hiddleston). All scored with Samuel Barber's Concerto for Violin.

Director: Dexter Fletcher
Cast: Charlie Creed-Miles, Will Poulter, Liz White, Sammy Williams, Leo Gregory
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Wild Bill quad poster

Bill (Creed-Miles) has just got out of prison. Returning home to Stratford, he finds his old gang members grown up, his wife in Spain, and his kids home alone. Social services aren’t too happy about that, so Bill is stuck there struggling to get back on the right side of society. His sons – and the local drug dealers – aren’t happy about that either.

This is a heartfelt story of a guy trying to go straight, and the cast really know how to sell it. Bill’s two boys are vulnerable but angry, with Will Poulter’s independent youngster really standing out. “I didn’t leave home. Home left me,” he says, staring down the veterans around him with the impressive screen presence he showed in Son of Rambow.

Director: Alexander Zeldovich
Cast: Maksim Sukhanov, Justine Waddell, Vitaly Kischenko, Danila Koslovsky, Daniela Stoyanovich
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Target is a massively long, visually stunning, sprawling epic. In Moscow, in 2020, Viktor (Sukhanov), the Minister for Natural Resources, and his wife, Zoya (British actress Justine Waddell), are suffering ennui. They hear rumours of a fountain of youth in a remote area of Russia. The couple, with Zoya's TV presenter brother Mitya (Kozlovsky), head to the Altai mountains. In the nearby isolated village they meet other players in search of their lost youth: a crossing guard, Nikolai (Kischenko), and Anna (Stoyanovich), who voices the Chinese for Beginners course that Mitya is obsessed with.

Director: DR Hood
Cast: Claire Foy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Shaun Evans
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Young couple Dawn (Foy) and David (Cumberbatch) have left the big city for the slower paced life of David's childhood home, a tiny village in the Fens, to raise children. Dawn is finding her niche in the country, keeping chickens, singing in the choir, and fixing up the wreck of a house the couple have bought. But at the arrival of David's brother Nick (Evans), the couple's idyllic lives start to unravel.

Director: Gerardo Naranjo
Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Irene Azuela, Noe Hernández, James Russo, José Yenque
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Miss Bala is the story of an ordinary girl. Like all girls, she wants to be a beauty queen, because winning a pageant is the only way out of her downtrodden life in Mexico. The night before an audition, she winds up in a nightclub with her friend Suzu and witnesses a gang murder. Things go downhill from there.

Adopted into the gang by ringleader Lino, Laura (Sigman) is in a bit of a pickle. If she were Whoopi Goldberg, she could just hide in a convent. But this is Mexico, a land of cartels and conflict, and things aren't so simple. Where is Suzu? Is her son safe? And what about that beauty pageant?

Director: Roland Emmerich
Cast: Rhys Ifans, Rafe Spall, Vanessa Redgrave
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That Shakespeare didn't write the plays he's credited with is not a new idea. The fact that disaster movie veteran Emmerich has made a film about it is quite honestly bizarre. The film posits that Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Ifans), is the true author of Shakespeare's work; as a nobleman, it would, of course, be unseemly for Oxford to be publishing his work. And so he badger's Benjamin Johnson into performing his plays as part of a cunning plan to sway the populous and get ailing Queen Elizabeth (Redgrave) to name the Earl of Essex heir and wrest the crown away from Scottish King James.

Director: George Clooney
Cast: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Paul Giamatii, Phillip Seymour Hoffman
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Politics is bad. It’s shocking, I know, but it turns out that Presidential Elections are a hotbed of backstabbing and betrayal. Which is why the morally-minded Governor Morris (Clooney) offers such a ray of hope for assistant campaign manager Steve (Gosling). But can ethics and idealism survive in such a cutthroat world? (Spoiler: it can’t.)

Director: Dominik Moll
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Joséphine Japy, Roxane Duran
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Vincen Cassel is Brother Ambrosio, a charismatic, misogynistic monk with groupies, found as a babe and raised in the monastery. He is devout and his emphatic sermons have earned him a huge celebrity following, including the lovely Antonia (Japy), who is moved to fainting. Sister Agnes (Duran), on the other hand, becomes a victim of Ambrosio's piousness, as the monk discovers that the nun is pregnant. She is punished, but swears revenge.

Then, the mysterious masked Valerio appears at the monastery, horribly scarred in a fire, and begs to be taken on as a novice. But this new novice has odd abilities and a strange hold over Ambrosio. And through a series of coincidences, Ambrosio meets and becomes obsessed with Antonia...

Director: Nick Murphy
Cast: Rebecca Hall, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton, Isaac Hempstead Wright
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We all thought the same thing when we saw Pride and Prejudice: Pemberley is terrifying. Well, now we've been proved right, because Nick Murphy's made a horror movie there. And it's even scarier than Mr. Darcy's manners.

Florence Cathcart (Hall) is a woman who believes in science over spirits. She runs around period England disproving paranormal acitivity, using nothing more than some mechanical contraptions and her brain. She's like the new Jonathan Creek. A ghostbuster, 1920s style.

Director: Nanni Moretti
Cast: Nanni Moretti, Francesco Piccolo, Michel Piccoli
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Thanks to mass media coverage (and Angels & Demons), we all know how a new Pope is elected. (It doesn't involve Ewan McGregor and a helicopter.) First, the conclave begins, cutting cardinals off from the world while they vote for a successor. Then, the burning of the ballot papers to mark the successful ordaining of his new Holiness. Then, everyone plays volleyball. In slow-motion.