Elsinore

This film puts Andrew Scott in line to become the first out gay man to win the best actor Oscar. He plays Ian Charleson, who became a star in Chariots of Fire and in 1989 took on the role of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre when Daniel Day-Lewis withdrew, despite being desperately ill with Aids, knowing that the strain would accelerate his illness. For Charleson, the play’s themes of life and death, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, were all too real.

7 Miles Out

Fans of Manchester, Manchesterism and indie British film-maker Carol Morley will relish the thought of her much anticipated new movie, adapted from her autobiographical novel of the same title. The lead character, Anne, based on Morley herself, experiences an emotional crisis as a teen and takes refuge in the thrilling new Manchester music scene, featuring bands including Joy Division, New Order and Magazine. Lucy Halliday is Anne and her mum and dad are played by Gemma Whelan and Aidan Gillen.

Fatherland

Polish film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski has created a brilliantly poised, superbly performed historical vignette in black-and-white whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ anguish. Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller play Thomas and Erika Mann – that is, the great Nobel-winning German author and his daughter. After the war and the destruction of the Nazis, whose tyranny he escaped by fleeing to the US, Mann returns to Germany with daughter in tow, to accept prizes in the fatherland’s capitalist West and communist East. But he is in denial about a terrible family crisis.

La Gradiva

Surely the year’s best debut feature? French cinematographer turned director Marine Atlan tells a gripping story of a school trip to Pompeii: an emotionally troubled teacher has to keep an emotionally troubled bunch of kids in line. Perhaps the most difficult is a boy called Toni, who has always believed a story told him by his mum that he has aristocratic lineage from a Pompeii nobleman whose castle was reduced to rubble by southern Italy’s 1980 earthquake, an event he thinks is thrillingly analogous to the Pompeii disaster. He’s heading for his own emotional earthquake.

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

Birmingham is the setting for this absorbing and moving social realist picture from film-maker Clio Barnard, featuring terrific performances from its young cast. It’s a home town drama about a city to which the characters are fundamentally loyal while simultaneously longing to escape; as they approach the end of their 20s, they must come to terms with decisions and life choices. Joe Cole, Daryl McCormack, Lola Petticrew, Anthony Boyle and Jay Lycurgo are the cast-members bursting with energy, tenderness and vulnerability.

A Long Winter

Andrew Haigh’s mysterious and beautiful new film is adapted by him from a story by Colm Tóibín: a poignant, subversive study of grief and desire, and the terrible, infantilised loneliness of men without women. A family living a tough existence in remote 1950s Colorado are traumatised when the troubled mother of the household, played by Caitriona Balfe, disappears one winter and the menfolk, having decided that the search can only resume once the snows have melted, enter into a strange new period of bachelor freedom.

The Blood Countess

It’s the part she was born to play. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, legendary for having the blood of hundreds of young girls on her hands, and indeed all over the rest of her body, in an attempt to attain eternal youth. Her Báthory is a vampire who has returned to present-day Vienna, the historical seat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, seen initially gliding through its sewers as if on a royal barge, making her way far more coolly than Harry Lime in The Third Man.

I Love Boosters

Chicago rapper and film-maker Boots Riley, the comic bard of black anxiety and white privilege, returns with a hyperactive romp about a bandit group of fashion influencers who deal with the issue of price by simply “boosting” clothes from stores. This group of outlaws includes Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige, and the resentful fashionista ice-queen whose wares are being sticky-fingered in this way is played by Demi Moore.

Gentle Monster

Here is a coldly eloquent and disquieting drama starring Léa Seydoux about women who find themselves imprisoned by a duty of care and loyalty to the men in their lives. Seydoux plays Lucy, an acclaimed musician with a TV director husband and three-year-old child; one day, the police show up at their door to take away the husband’s computers, tablets and smartphones. The husband replies unconvincingly to Lucy’s desperate questions as to what this is all about, and her ordeal is her need to believe him, to twist and contort what she sees so it will fit into the husband’s shapeshifting explanations.

The Debut

Jesse Eisenberg follows up his excellent drama A Real Pain with this much admired and widely enjoyed dramedy about community theatre, for which Julianne Moore may be once again in the Oscar conversation. She plays a neglected housewife, going mad with boredom and emotional neglect in her Stepford prison; she tries out for a local amateur troupe’s production of a musical (whose hokey songs Eisenberg has himself written). Needless to say, she transforms from a suburban doormat into a Bette Davis-level diva.

My Notes on Mars

Hungarian film-maker Lili Horvát has always had a taste for the inexplicable; now she makes her English-language debut with a film that fuses romance, science fiction and mystery. Mackenzie Davis is Margot, a scientist with emotional problems who vanishes while on a hiking trip with her husband Sam, played by Rupert Friend. Much later, at her memorial service, Margot sensationally reappears, with no memory of what happened, but a determination to destroy her notes on Mars. Is that where’s she’s … gulp … been?

Tender Loving Care

Is this Mike Leigh’s final film? Let’s hope not. It’s a tender, poignant drama that is also candid and forthright, muscular in its effects. It’s an intergenerational story about the friendship of two women from west London, Rosie and Amy, who share a flat and work in social care. The film gives a complex, interrelated pattern of scenes showing their personal and professional lives and the people close to them. It is a lovely film.

• The London film festival is on 7-18 October