Bertolucci's surprise

London Film Festival spoiled viewers for choice. Among the highlights was Bernardo Bertolucci's finest movie in more than a decade, reports Michael Dwyer.

Europe's largest non-competitive film festival, The Times BFI 47th London Film Festival, offered 180 feature films and 120 shorts from 45 countries. Stretched across 16 days up to last Thursday's closing night, it left viewers spoiled for choice.

This caused inevitable scheduling clashes, and then there was the matter of commuting between the venues, from the National Film Theatre on the South Bank and the Odeon West End in Leicester Square to the Ritzy in Brixton and the Tricycle on Kilburn High Road.

It helped that I had seen many of the big attractions already, at Cannes or Toronto, among them Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu's 21 Grams, Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant, Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music In The World, Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night and Marco Tullio Giordana's magisterial Italian epic The Best Of Youth.

Of the films new to me at London, it was the latest work of another Italian director that provided the most agreeable surprise: Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, which proved far more substantial and engrossing than suggested by some of the reviews after its world première, at the Venice festival in September.

The setting is Paris during the heady days of May 1968, when a young US student, Matthew (Michael Pitt), is befriended by French siblings Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel), fellow film buffs he meets at the Cinémathèque Française. As their parents are going away for the month, they invite Matthew to share their home - and, before long, their bath and their beds - as unrest builds on the streets outside.

Much of the flak in Venice was due to the fact that the street riots were largely relegated to the background of this sensuous ménage à trois, and then there was the distraction of the film's sexual candour, underlined by the coincidence of Bertolucci's return to the city where he made the hugely controversial Last Tango In Paris.

Adapted by Gilbert Adair from his novel The Holy Innocents, Bertolucci's film is more concerned with capturing the spirit of May 1968 and with exploring the development of three overlapping utopias - political, cinematic and sexual. As they argue passionately about political rights and wrongs, the three idealistic young protagonists engage in movie quizzes that carry sexual forfeits.

Life deliberately imitates art in explicit re-enactments of classic film scenes, most thrillingly when the trio sprint exuberantly through the Louvre in a nod to Bande À Part, Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 film. The Dreamers is a thoughtful, compelling chamber piece, Bertolucci's finest film in well over a decade.

Given its world première at the London festival, John Furse's Blind Flight dramatises the experiences of the Belfast teacher Brian Keenan and the English journalist John McCarthy during their years as hostages in Lebanon during the second half of the 1980s. Based on Keenan's memoir, An Evil Cradling, and with significant screenplay contributions from McCarthy, this is an aptly austere treatment of their story, shot through with humanity and welcome flashes of humorous relief.

On screen alone together for most of the film, the two leading actors - Ian Hart as Keenan and Linus Roache as McCarthy - bring an admirable conviction to their roles, credibly building and establishing the close friendship that helped them to share the weight of each other's fear and to endure the sheer tedium of their imprisonment over more than four years. While we sympathise with their plight at all times, the film achieves this without resorting to ranting indignation or vilification of their Lebanese guards.

The US actor Tom McCarthy makes an engaging directing début with The Station Agent, a droll serious comedy that won the audience award at the Sundance festival earlier this year. Peter Dinklage, who is four feet five, plays Fin McBride, a laconic loner who inherits a desolate train depot in remotest New Jersey.

Against his will, Fin gradually accepts the friendship offered by a grieving painter (Patricia Clarkson), a loquacious hot-dog salesman (Bobby Cannavale) and a young library assistant (Michelle Williams). All these lonely people find solace in each other as this serenely paced movie proceeds to a gentle banjo-driven score, and the performances are consistently natural and credible.

The splendid Clarkson turns up again, impressive as ever, in Pieces Of April, which offers the distinctly unappetising prospect of yet another US movie bringing together a dysfunctional family for Thanksgiving dinner. She plays the ailing and bluntly outspoken materfamilias reluctantly travelling with her husband (Oliver Platt) and their two younger children from upstate New York to lower Manhattan for a dinner calamitously prepared by their daughter April (Katie Holmes), who, they have yet to discover, has moved in with her black boyfriend (Derek Luke).

Adeptly sidestepping most of the clichés inherent in this scenario, the writer-director Peter Hedges amusingly cuts between the family's fraught journey and April's mounting culinary crises until she, like the Irish immigrant family in Jim Sheridan's In America, discovers the kindness of strangers in her grungy apartment building.

More family problems arise in Mambo Italiano, this time of the Italian Catholic variety. Smoothly disguising its origins as a stage play, this sharp comedy is set in Montreal as two childhood friends rediscover each other in their early 20s and move in together as gay lovers.

Nino (Peter Miller) is a cop and terrified of putting a toe out of the closet, but Angelo (Luke Kirby), an aspirant screenwriter, wants to come out. When he does, to the horror of Nino and of their parents, the consequences, though obvious, are regularly hilarious. Briskly paced by Émile Gaudreault, its director, this breezy comedy plays like a gay spin on Moonstruck.

The Catalan director Cesc Gay follows Krámpack, his gay teen tale, with an ambitious mosaic charting the linked relationships of disparate older heterosexual characters in En La Ciudad (In the City). As they are introduced in turn over the busy opening scenes, the film is initially confusing before it establishes their personalities and intentions more precisely.

In these overlapping stories of secrets and lies, desires and tensions, as the protagonists are faced with the consequences of their actions, the results are quietly devastating. In what must be a screen first, a mobile phone is used as an instrument of emotional trauma when a man spots his wife in the distance, phones her and watches aghast as she casually rejects his call.

The entirely unpredictable New Zealand drama Perfect Strangers begins as a generally dissatisfied young woman, Melanie (Rachael Blake), out on the town for the night, is drawn to an enigmatic man (Sam Neill). "Your place or mine?" he asks, and they go to his boat, on which she awakens the next morning to find it heading for a remote island setting not dissimilar to Neill's home in The Piano. Although the film is overstretched dramatically as a two-hander for much of its duration, its risk-taking structure and evident confidence sustain attention, as do the sterling performances of Neill and, in particular, Blake, who was last seen here in Lantana.

The eponymous character in Emilie Deleuze's French drama Mister V. is a wild stallion acquired by a trainer as part of an insurance scam. The new owner's brother, a scientist working at an agricultural institute, becomes fascinated by the obstinate animal and its gift for jumping heights.

Despite the serious physical and emotional toll wreaked by Mister V., the scientist (played by Mathieu Demy, son of the director Jacques Demy) takes on an obsession echoing that of the disturbed young man in Equus but without the heavy-handed sexual connotations of that play and film. The result is an imaginative, intriguing and tense movie.

The London festival's principal award, the Sutherland Trophy for the most original and imaginative film on the programme, went to Siddiq Barmak's powerful Afghan drama Osama, which Barmak produced with the Irish producer Julie le Brocquy.

Its focus is a 13-year-old girl who risks posing as a boy to earn money for her widowed mother, who is not allowed to work. Charged by some extraordinary imagery and made with commendable clarity and justified anger, the film presents an appalling picture of life under the Taliban regime.