The most significant two weeks in the British calendar for film are soon upon us, and it’s easy and indeed perfectly justified to begin feeling ridiculously excited now that the programme for The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival has been announced.

At the press launch this morning in the Odeon Leicester Square we were treated to 30 minutes of choice footage from some of the most anticipated films in the line-up of this year’s festival, which runs from October 14 to 29, and from just this brief morsel of the cornucopia of features, shorts and animation included in the diverse selection, it’s already clear that there is definitely a lot to look forward to.

For the festival’s prestigious Opening Night, Wes Anderson’s very entertaining-looking Fantastic Mr. Fox will have its world premiere and the director and some cast members, including Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and Helen McCrory, will all be in attendance. As the other bookend to the festival, Sam Taylor-Wood’s highly anticipated Nowhere Boy, which looks at the early life of John Lennon, will premiere at the Closing Night Gala.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Also debuting on the London streets is the brilliant looking off-key comedy The Men Who Stare At Goats, which sees George Clooney as a supposed psychic soldier and part of an elite team that claims to be able to pass through solid walls and kill goats just by staring at them. Others that will hopefully tickle our funny bone will be The Informant!, for which director Steven Soderbergh will be in attendance, and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, while John Hillcoat’s apocalyptic The Road and the Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson-starrer Chloe will give our brains a thought-provoking workout.

Of the number of representatives of French cinema that the festival is playing host to this year, just some of the many to look forward to are MICMACS, which looks characteristically whimsical from the Amelie helmer Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Jacque Audiard’s A  Prophet, whose visceral intensity and prison-set crime drama gives it a sense of adrenalin a la this year’s Mesrine.

Also standing out from the crowd was Michael Haneke’s return to German language cinema in The White Ribbon, a black-and-white film looking at rural life in a German village preceding the First World War. Newcomer Malcolm Venville’s 44 Inch Chest offered up a memorable snippet of a prostrate Ray Winstone in a trashed apartment, while 30 seconds of Jim Jamusch’s The Limits Of Control was enough to garner interest in the director’s latest smart and bizarre work.

The list goes on. That summation only touches upon a handful of the treats in store in a festival line-up that ranges from the Nick Hornby-scripted drama An Education to the restoration of Anthony Asquith’s 1928 silent movie Underground via the story of poverty, obesity and abuse in the talk of Sundance, Precious.

To really get to grips with everything the hugely enthralling London Film Festival has to offer, a visit to the BFI website is definitely in order.

Georgine Waller