A vengeful James Bond, George W Bush, Mike Tyson, Bobby Sands, Che Guevara and the late Hunter S Thompson will be the iconic anti-heroes of The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival next month.

The full programme, announced today, also boasts a record number of world and european premieres among 189 features and 108 shorts drawn from 43 countries.

Fittingly, in the BFI’s 75th year, the lineup includes the festival’s strongest roster of homegrown British titles for more than a decade, among them new offerings from Michael Winterbottom, Danny Boyle and Richard Eyre.

However it is the rogue’s gallery of strong leading males-both fictional and historical- that most catches the eye.

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Background

• How Josh Brolin learnt to love W

• Gonzo: celebrating Thompson’s legacy

• Double vision: meet Sir Richard Eyre

• New directions for the London Film Festival

• Boyle explains why Mumbai is a key location

Background

• Is Charlie Kaufman out of his head?

• Class wars: the pact between teacher and students

• Dakota Blue Richards: girl in 10,000

• Jessica Biel: formidable screen force

• America’s muse captures Winterbottom

Background

• Frost/Nixon: an historic meeting of minds

• Boyle returns to squalor and form

• London Film Festival line-up unveiled

• Of Time and the City

• Oliver Stone's W

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• Oliver Stone's George Bush biopic

No film in the world this year is more calculated to provoke than W, which will have its European premiere on Thursday 23 October asThe Times Gala.

Oliver Stone’s film deploys an all star cast and - to judge from the trailer, set to What A Wonderful World - great dollops of satirical anger to portray the rise to power of the current President of the United States.

Josh Brolin (No Country For Old Men) plays the second President Bush as a hard drinking, frivolous college brat whose life is turned around after he finds God.

“Partying, chasing tail, driving drunk. Who do you think you are: a Kennedy?” demands the first President Bush (James Cromwell, who played Prince Philip in The Queen).

“You’re a Bush. Act like one.”

Thandie Newton, Scott Glenn, Ioan Gruffyd, Richard Dreyfuss, Toby Jones and Jeffrey Wright co-star as Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and General Colin Powell respectively. Other characters on the cast list include Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac, “Evanglical 2” and “Exotic Dancer.”

The screening, held less than a fortnight before the US election, is backed up by a panel discussion on Cinema Under George W Bush later in the festival.

Stone is one of a cavalcade of leading directors showing new work in London this year.

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