The LFF's Best Film Award winner, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car follow-up Evil Does Not Exist, is a characteristic mix of extended takes and conversations, limpid beauty and dizzyingly intense dramatic incident, and just one of the festival's major auteur UK premieres.

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to The Favourite, is an intoxicating achievement, a ravishing, twisted, very funny and even radical fable that must be a major contender in the awards season that gets into gear as the London Film Festival closes. 

Martin Scorsese walks onstage to a hero’s welcome, shoulders a little hunched, with a touch of sideways shuffle or hustle, taking acclaim in his stride at 80. He has sold out London’s 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall for the BFI’s biggest Screen Talk by far, and the queue for returns stretches into the street, to see a director as big as any star.

The Rolling Stones are winning plaudits for their Hackney Diamonds album, but Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill’s documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg is a brilliant and sometimes painfully emotional portrait of the woman who helped inspire some of their finest work in their golden years, including “Gimme Shelter” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. Pallenberg’s heroin habit prompted Marianne Faithfull to write “Sister Morphine”.

The London Film Festival continues to pull in an eclectic selection of films from all over the world. And it’s from the countries not known for their movie industries that some of the most impressive and engaging films have emerged.

When Kristy Matheson won the job of BFI London Film Festival director, she spoke of the chance afforded by festivals for filmmakers, artists and audiences “to commune on a grand scale – to experience ideas, ask big questions and celebrate together.”

Just three days into her first LFF, it’s clear that Matheson and her team are delivering on that vision. There is definitely a sense of provocation, celebration and film-buzzing community in the air. 

Coming towards the end of the year, the London Film Festival generally has a “the best of the rest” feel to it, offering an excellent overview of the year’s releases. And what this edition shows is an encouraging, and very satisfying expression of women’s growing empowerment outside and within cinema.

There were decidedly mixed, north-south emotions on the film festival circuit last week: just as the latest edition of the BFI London Film Festival opened, administrators announced the immediate closure of its illustrious UK cousin, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, along with two of Scotland’s most beloved cinemas. 

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider was a film of rare honesty and beauty. Who would have thought she’d be able to top the power of that majestic docudrama? But with Nomadland she has.

In 2012, two great Danes, director Thomas Vinterberg and actor Mads Mikkelsen, teamed up for the powerhouse drama The Hunt, about a teacher victimised by his community when wrongly accused of abusing a pupil.