185 features, 133 shorts, over 400 separate screenings, over 500 visiting filmmakers and highest ever audience attendances – the figures for the 51st London Film Festival sound impressive, but we all know statistics can unspool any story. The real question is very simple: was LFF 51 worth watching?

The answer’s an emphatic yes. At the Woolworth pick-and-mix counter of cinema, London viewers were not just kids in a sweet store, but able to mainline hard candy from virtually every jar. The breadth of choice and quality – buoyed by fantastic Cannes and Venice festivals – meant Sandra Hebron’s crack team could serve up everything from fizzing sherbet dip (Wes Anderson’s closer The Darjeeling Limited), sweet-and-sour bonbons (Jason Reitman’s beloved teenage pregnancy comedy Juno with Ellen Page and Arrested Development pair Jason Bateman and Michael Cera) and – seemingly – everlasting gobstoppers (Carlos Reygadas’s hypnotic Silent Light, whose opening six-minute sunrise was arguably the shot of the whole festival).

Inevitably Hollywood dominated most of the Gala screenings, featuring red carpet appearances from a very pregnant Halle Berry for Things We Lost in the Fire; a very bouncy Tom Cruise and very crinkly Robert Redford, both for “world premiere” (and rare festival flop) Lions for Lambs; and a very moody Sean Penn, booed by press and fans alike for ignoring them at Into the Wild, though, distracted by thoughts of his home almost burning down in the Californian forest fires, perhaps understandable.

British hopes were represented by Nick Broomfield’s searing Iraq docudrama Battle for Haditha with real ex-Marines as the leads, Hammer and Tongs’s ’80s-set coming-of-age crowd-pleaser Son of Rambow and Asif Kapadia’s brutal arctic tale Far North featuring Michelle Yeoh, Sean Bean and perhaps the sickest finale of the festival.

In addition Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann were reunited for the first time since Withnail and I in Duncan Wellaway’s short Always Crashing in the Same Car, a somewhat laboured effort, saved by its stars’ interplay and a neat climactic twist.

Talks and Masterclasses from a surprisingly mellowed former enfant terrible Harmony Korine (for his Michael Jackson impersonator / flying nun opus Mister Lonely) and the ever-classy Laura Linney (The Savages) made up for cancellations from Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror) and Ben Affleck, whose accomplished kidnap thriller Gone, Baby, Gone was pulled for its eerie Madeleine McCann similarities.

Maddest of all were “Wizards of Odd” David Lynch and Donovan pitching Transcendental Meditation for the masses. Lynch was on especially fine Jimmy-Stewart-from-Mars form, requesting questioners to line up at the sides of the NFT stage, before answering any and every question, from how he gets that trademark quiff, to the meaning of life. Apparently it’s “Totality”.

Back on planet Earth, the best of the fest? Always a difficult one but for this viewer, a toss-up between Darjeeling, Juno, brooding Brad Pitt Western The Assassination of Jesse James, Romanian Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days and the best surprise film in years, the Coen Brothers awesome neo-noir No Country for Old Men. But really, this was a year where great surprises lurked in plain sight. Roll on LFF 2008.

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The published article can be read on IGN – ‘LFF Diary #15’