It’s easy to focus on the big names and the red-carpet wow factor at The Times BFI London Film Festival, but audiences shouldn’t overlook the smaller films – there are plenty of delights and discoveries to keep the adventurous cinephile happy. As many of these are still without distributors, this could be your only chance to catch them.

Eldorado
Director: Bouli Lanners

Lanners, the writer, director and star of this bittersweet and disarmingly funny Belgian road movie, seems to be the kind of chap it would be fun to hang out with. Even the burglars who broke into his house thought so – this film is inspired by a real-life encounter in which Lanners surprised some thieves in his home, but, rather than turn them in, spent the night chatting with them. Yvan (Lanners) and the hapless burglar Elie (Fabrice Adde) set off on a vividly absurdist road trip in which both the sullenly flat landscapes and the misfit characters are imbued with an engaging warmth .
Oct 23, Odeon West End 1, 9pm; Oct 15, Ritzy, Brixton 2.15pm

Cloud Nine
Dir: Andreas Dresen

The surreal strangeness of war

Ari Folman tells Wendy Ide about his animated view of war in Waltz with Bashir, and how there is 'no glamour in war'

• 5 to watch: unmissable documentaries - Blind Loves, Modern Life

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

Related Internet Links

• London Film Festival 2008

This humane and nonjudgmental German film is an acting masterclass. Ursula Werner plays Inge who, after 30 years of marriage, falls head over heels for the seventysomething Karl. The gentle passion between the two is captured with an intimacy that lays bare the smitten teenagers in the hearts of these pensioners.
Oct 16 National Film Theatre 2, 6.15pm; Oct 17, Odeon West End 1, 4pm

Modern Life (La Vie Moderne: Profils Paysans)
Dir: Raymond Depardon

Depardon’s documentary – the latest of his lyrical studies of rural life in the French highlands – is an empathetic and endlessly patient portrait of a dying way of life. A wife and her husband see their dairy herd reduced to a single cow; two of elderly brothers struggle with the grind of sheep farming. And an idealistic young woman who dreams of raising goats can’t afford to mend her barn roof. There is both an affectionate humour and a melancholy poetry to the film.
Oct 19, NFT1, 6.30pm; Oct 20, Curzon Mayfair, 4pm

Goodbye Solo
Dir: Ramin Bahrani

The director of Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, Bahrani specialises in intimate, small-scale stories of immigrant life in the US. This latest picture features an odd-couple pairing between Solo (a terrific first-time performance from Soulémane Sy Savané), a garulous, expansive Senegalese immigrant who drives a taxi in North Carolina, and William (Red West), a terminally grouchy passenger who offers Solo the job of driving him to a local cliff-top beauty spot and leaving him there. Solo realises that the old man intends to end his life and befriends him.
Oct 17, NFT1, 6.30pm; Oct 18, OWE1, 4pm

Momma’s Man
Dir: Azazel Jacobs

One of several particularly strong American indie films in the festival (see also Medicine for Melancholy and the music documentary Largo), Momma’s Man has already received a raft of positive reviews in the US. The film explores the minefield of arrested adolescence via sad sack Mikey (Matt Boren) who, after a weekend visit to his parents in Manhattan, pretends to have missed his flight home to LA and moves back in with them. Jacobs adds a layer of resonance by casting his own parents, the experimental film-maker Ken Jacobs and his wife Flo, in the key roles.
Oct 16, NFT1, 9pm; Oct 19, ICA, 5pm

The Good, The Bad, The Weird
Dir: Kim Jee-Woon

Probably the most ambitious Korean film yet produced, and without doubt the most gleefully demented, this explosive Sergio Leone tribute is a riot of nonstop, stylistically audacious action and cartoon violence. The setting is Manchuria in the 1930s, under Japanese occupation. The good is a brooding bounty hunter, the bad a sharply dressed bandit and the weird an inept train robber – although, frankly, they’re all pretty bad deep down. All three seek an ancient treasure map and will dynamite anything in their way to get their hands on it. It’s a blast – literally.
Oct 30, OWE2, 12.45pm and, 8.45pm

Tony Manero
Dir: Pablo Larrain

Disco-obsessive; performer; psychopath – Raúl (Alfredo Castro) is a fiftysomething Chilean who seems oblivious to the dark days of the Pinochet era, so immersed is he in an unhealthy obsession with Saturday Night Fever. Raúl models himself, white satin suit and all, on John Travolta’s character and he’ll stop at nothing to win the local TV station’s lookalike competition. The grubby realism of the camerawork, the shockingly unexpected violence and, most of all, the sense of threat gives an unsettling insight into life in Chile’s oppressive recent history.
Oct 18, NFT1 8.45pm; Oct 20 Greenwich Picturehouse, 8.45pm

Les Plages d’Agnes
Dir: Agnes Varda

The veteran maverick says that this idiosyncratic memoir will be her final film – she is, after all, approaching 80. A collage of photographs, reconstructions and clips from her own films and those of her late husband Jacques Demy, this is an unassuming charmer, full of playful symbolism and the film-maker’s personal touches.
Oct 24, NFT1, 8.45pm; Oct 28, NFT1, 3.30pm

Lion’s Den
Dir Pablo Trapero

The Argentine director is in searing form after a couple of less effective films. Lion’s Denstars Trapero’s wife Martina Gusman as a pregnant young woman in a tough Buenos Aires prison with the prospect of raising her son behind bars. It’s a fascinating film: Trapero’s naturalistic approach captures the tensions of a community of mothers and children insulated and isolated from the world outside.
Oct 28, OWE2, 6pm; Oct 29, OWE1, 1pm

Johnny Mad Dog
Dir: Jean Stéphane Sauvaire

One of the genuinely terrifying films of the festival, this striking debut follows a band of child soldiers as they wreak havoc in an unnamed African country. Shocking, occasionally surreal, the film was made with the cooperation of the Liberian Government. The fact that many of the young actors are former child soldiers themselves adds an uncomfortable frisson. The feral aggression of this pack of children, all bared teeth and unfocused anger, dehumanises them and their victims.
Oct 24, OWE1, 6.30pm; Oct 26, Ritzy, 2.15pm

Box office: 020-7928 3232

Editor's choice

• Guns N’Roses: Chinese Democracy
• The 50 Biggest Movies of 2009
• Quantum of Solace