The 50th London Film Festival spanned the globe and all genres - viewers could pick and choose, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent

In October 1957, when the British Film Institute presented the first London Film Festival, 15 movies were screened. Over the years, the event extended its reach from its home at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank to accommodate cinemas in the West End and across the city.

As the festival celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, it had expanded to showing 183 feature films and 131 shorts. Running for 16 days, it is one of the longest film festivals in the world. Even the title has grown longer, to name-check the principal sponsor and the organisers - the Times BFI 50th London Film Festival.

Such a vast programme of movies might suggest an event that is not particularly selective. However, that represents just the tip of the celluloid (and HD) iceberg, as more than 2,000 feature films were submitted this year. Artistic director Sandra Hebron and her team of programmers chose very well indeed, assembling a line-up that spanned the globe and all the genres, from high-profile US productions to no-budget work from unknown directors.

With so much on offer, viewers have the scope to design their individual film festival, perhaps dominated by the gala screenings on Leicester Square, which were awash with movie stars this year, or by films screened on the South Bank and unlikely to turn up ever again in a London cinema.

Coincidentally, given that the first film shown at the inaugural 1957 festival was Akira Kurosawa's Japanese reworking of Macbeth in Throne of Blood, the 50th festival opened with The Last King of Scotland, in which Ugandan dictator Idi Amin explains that he has named two of his sons Mackenzie and Campbell because of his love of Scotland. Directed by Kevin Macdonald, this imaginative drama is anchored in Forest Whitaker's exuberantly intimidating portrayal of Amin as a man out of his depth as a national leader, making it up as he goes along, and resorting to mass homicide when he turns desperate.

The festival closed with Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's ambitious Babel, which concludes the trilogy in which he and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga employ overlapping narratives to reflect on the human condition. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Garcia Bernal head the solid cast.

Of the movies new to me in London, the pick of the US independent productions on show was Ryan Fleck's edgy, absorbing debut feature, Half Nelson, which casts out the cliches of that mini-genre centred on unorthodox but inspirational teachers. Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is a popular history teacher at a Brooklyn junior high school, but he is faced with some harsh life lessons when his drug addiction spirals out of control.

A gifted actor, Gosling plays the troubled teacher in a wonderfully subtle and detailed performance that is in perfect synch with Fleck's thoughtful, effectively low-key film that offers no phoney epiphanies. Newcomer Shareeka Epps is revelatory as the 13-year-old pupil who cares for her teacher's plight and understands it all too well from her own family background.

The family in Susanne Bier's compelling Danish drama, After the Wedding, is exceptionally wealthy, and unstinting in the preparations for their daughter's imminent wedding. The paterfamilias, Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), is a billionaire planning to make a substantial donation to an orphanage in India, where Jacob (Mads Mikkleson, who plays the villain in Casino Royale), a Danish expatriate works as a volunteer. He summons Jacob to Copenhagen for a meeting, and invites him to the wedding.

One of European cinema's most accomplished storytellers, Bier has directed 11 films in the past 15 years, and the quantity of her work is matched by its quality. After the Wedding marks her third collaboration with screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen, following the riveting dramas, Open Hearts and Brothers, both of which are set for the US remake treatment. Her new film is rooted in a strong narrative dealing with life's messy complications, and it proves deeply involving and emotional as it reflects on the themes of regrets, past mistakes, blood ties and mortality.

Bier's international reputation has been overshadowed somewhat by her flamboyant, publicity-driven fellow Dane, Lars von Trier, who was represented at London with The Boss of It All, although von Trier, who refuses to fly, did not attend. After his tedious and irritating Brechtian exercises, Dogville and Manderlay, von Trier lightens up and gets back to basics in the new film.

It's set in a Copenhagen company where the boss, Ravn (Peter Gantzler), adeptly manipulates his hard-working staff, pretending to be reporting to a fictional owner in the US. When Ravn plans to sell his company to an Icelandic businessman (played by film director Fridrik Thor Fridriksson), he hires an actor (Jens Albinus) to play the role of the non-existent "boss of it all".

Von Trier himself features off-screen as the occasional narrator, self-consciously drawing attention to the artifice of film-making by pausing the picture to offer some perspectives on comedy and to introduce the movie as one that is "not worth a moment's reflection".

He employs a new camera process, Automavision, whereby the camera itself chooses the shots - which results in shots that don't match in terms of lighting, and heads been cut out of the frame - and while von Trier retains control in the editing room, he pays scant regard for such trifles as continuity. In one sequence, the time shown on a wall clock varies drastically from one shot to another.

The movie makes for a mildly amusing diversion that recalls Frank Capra's morality tales from the 1930s, and it inevitably invites comparison with the TV series The Office, sharing many of that show's preoccupations, and almost as cringe-inducing in the embarrassments it sets up, albeit without triggering the hilarity of the TV series.

Norwegian writer-director Jens Lien presents an even bleaker view of office life in The Bothersome Man, in which Andreas (Trond Fausa Aurvag), a 40-year-old man, arrives in a possibly futuristic city without any memory of how he got there. He is hired as an accountant, but never appears to have any work to do, and his social life revolves around blandly polite dinner parties with work colleagues obsessively interested in interior design and makeovers.

This odd, quirky film is designed and lit in subdued shades of blue and grey, enhancing the sterile environment. There are echoes of the recent Children of Men - there are no children in this society - and of John Boorman's caustic The Tiger's Tail, which opens here tomorrow, in Lien's parable of a materialistic society and in his references to property, disposable income, stress, vomiting and suicide.

Following his impressive performances in The Keys to the House and the recent Romanzo Criminale, Italian actor Kim Rossi Stuart makes a notable directing debut with the touching family drama, Along the Ridge. Working on both sides of the camera, he plays Renato, a freelance Steadicam operator whose wife has walked out on him and their two children, the teenaged Viola (Marta Nobili) and 11-year-old Tommi (Alessandro Morace). In addition to the responsibility of raising the children, Renato has to cope with escalating debts, which are compounded by the work he loses because of his own temperamental outbursts. There are further complications when his estranged wife (Barbora Bobulova) unexpectedly returns, claiming to have controlled her erratic behaviour.

The consequences are observed through the sad eyes of young Tommi, who has his own problems, finding first love in his classroom and trying to measure up to his father's demanding expectations for him as a competitive swimmer. This intimate, observational film is consistently sensitive and honest, and beautifully acted by its small central cast.

Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest is a sharp satire set on the 16th anniversary of the end of the Ceausescu regime; the time in the title refers to when the dictator fled the presidential palace. The film takes place in a town where a self-important TV presenter organises a panel discussion on what happened in the locality that afternoon.

A telephone caller punctures the myth-making, insisting that instead of taking to the streets and declaring that communism is dead, they all got drunk. As more and more viewers call in, the show humorously takes on the form of a nasty, libellous version of Joe Duffy's Liveline, and the more people pretend to have been actively involved on the momentous 1989 day, the more you are prompted to consider just how many people were really inside the GPO in 1916.