Seventh art's in heaven

It stars Rachel Weisz, Anthony Hopkins and Jude Law - who was the only A-lister to attend the opening night gala.

The festival closed with Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea, based on Terence Rattigan's acclaimed play, which also stars Weisz as an adulterous wife.

It's terribly theatrical and reminiscent of 1940s and 1950s melodramas in its look and tone.

Exquisitely shot and acted, it reminded me of Brief Encounter, but with sex added in.

It wouldn't be the London Film Festival without George Clooney, who attended the premieres of The Ides Of March and The Descendants, two very different films.

The former is a gripping political thriller directed, written, produced and starring Clooney.

The latter, directed by Alexander Payne, blends comedy and tragedy effortlessly in a coming-of-age tale of a 50-year-old man who has to take charge of his sassy daughters when his wife ends up in a coma.

Clooney plays the flawed and beleaguered father brilliantly.

Michael Fassbender also graced the red carpet twice, first for Steve McQueen's Shame in which he gives a powerful performance as a sex addict who is trying to curb his appetites and then for David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method which co-stars Viggo Mortensen and Keira Knightley.

It takes a fascinating look at the birth of psychoanalysis and the intense relationship between Carl Jung (Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Mortensen).

Once again there was a strong British contingent which included Ralph Fiennes marking his directorial debut with Coriolanus, an impressive modern-day version of one of Shakespeare's more overlooked works.

Michael Winterbottom's Trishna is an inspired updating of Thomas Hardy's Tess Of The D'Urbervilles set in present-day India.

But Andrea Arnold's rather laboured reimagining of Wuthering Heights failed to fully impress.

Wild Bill, Dexter Fletcher's directorial debut set in the London's East End, was one of the best British films in the festival but the highlight for me was Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist, a wonderful homage to silent cinema.

Shot in black and white and wordless for most of the time, it is a sheer delight and irresistibly fun as it makes the most ingenious and effective use of music and sound.

Another favourite was Roman Polanski's Carnage, which lampoons the hypocrisies of the middle classes.

Starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C Reilly as the two couples who meet up to discuss their kids fighting, it's a crisp and razor-sharp drama and the four are magnificent to watch.

I also loved Roland Emmerich's controversial yet riveting Anonymous in which Rhys Ifans gives his best performance to date and Headhunters, a stylish but gritty Norwegian thriller about a headhunter who steals works of art on the side to keep himself solvent.

Lynne Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin, about a mother's disturbing relationship with her killer son, won this year's Best Film award - one of a number of entries which bizarrely also went on general release during the festival.

Record numbers attended the 16-day festival, at which more than 300 feature films and shorts from 57 countries were screened.

It brought a fitting end to Sandra Hebron's nine-year reign as its artistic director and it will be fascinating to see how her successor fares.

She will be a hard act to follow.