It may not have quite the glam tackiness of Cannes in May, nor the pizzazz of Venice in September, nor the chin-stroking seriousness of the Berlinale in February, but each October the BFI London Film Festival takes its own place on the European film festival circuit. theartsdesk has been attending the 55th festival in quadruplicate. On the closing day of a packed fortnight, our critics Nick Hasted, Emma Simmonds, Demetrios Matheou and, in quirkier mode, Matt Wolf bring you their highs and lows, their recommendations and their early warning signs.

Danny Boyle closed 2010’s London Film Festival, as he did 2008’s, and picked up a British Film Institute Fellowship to boot. His 127 Hours had at least one person I know covering her head with her coat during its already infamous auto-amputation-by-penknife scene, though it falls far short of Boyle’s previous triumph with Slumdog Millionaire. This hardly matters at a festival which, while derided by film journalists for its lack of global premieres, again gave Londoners like me two weeks to be lost in cinema.