Kicking off with Never Let Me Go, Mark Romanek’s star-studded counterpart to Kazuo Ishiguro’s hit novel of the same name, the diverse and overwhelming 54th BFI London Film Festival went from strength to strength this year, screening 137 films and 112 shorts across 20 screens throughout October.

Major international films included Darren Aronofsky’s The Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman as a bloody-minded dedicate of the New York Ballet; Another Year, the latest humanising suburban drama from Mike Leigh; and the Palme d’Or winner from Cannes 2010, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, definitely one to watch.

Another much-touted offering, The King’s Speech, featuring Colin Firth as a stammering, uncooperative George VI sent media Twitterers a-Tweeting when it premiered midway through the Festival.

It’s a British period drama, the likes of which I tend to avoid: one of those films that caters exclusively to the American imagination and its impressions of the English elite, cramming more vowels into the word ‘here’ than should be legally allowed. Having said that, King Firth’s sensitivity, bravery and bouts of hilariously posh swearing, complemented by his unorthodox Australian speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), make the film a funny and genuinely moving exposé on a very personal battle with disability. It is, understandably, one of the highlights of the festival.

One of the best things about a festival of such scale is the possibility for experimentation: getting lost, going for a wander and turning up with cinematic gems. In what appeared to be a private members’ club in Soho (but not that kind of club), I watched the prolific French actress Isabelle Huppert’s Copacabana in a tiny, but oh-so-comfy, cinema. Not her best work, but nonetheless a quaint tale of urban disenchantment certainly worthy of a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Back across the Channel, British films reminded the audience that it’s not all pomp and circumstance. The Arbor focuses on Bradford-born playwright Andrea Dunbar and her life growing up on the notoriously deprived Buttershaw Estate, recreating scenes from her plays in the streets where they were written to produce a creepy and moving literary biopic.

Richard Ayoade, best known as the nerdy, incompetent Moss from Channel 4’s The IT Crowd, made his directorial debut with Submarine: an idiosyncratic coming-of-age comedy about a boy from Swansea determined to save his parents’ marriage armed only with an extensive vocabulary and absolute self-confidence. Staying with the Welsh theme, Duffy appears on the big screen for the first time in Patagonia, a Welsh-language drama about the much romanticised Welsh settlement in Latin America, which turns out not to be the Utopia for which the emigrants had originally hoped.

The London Film Festival is just so huge there’s no way anyone can see everything they’d like to. Two intriguing films I missed include Howl, the story of America’s most notorious poem, with scholar-starlet James Franco playing Allen Ginsberg, and Chongqing Blues, in which a middle-aged man must return home to find out why his son has been gunned down by local police, confronting the new market-driven cultural revolution spreading through modern China.

What with masterclasses, talks, workshops and (to fit the regal flavour) film-maker afternoon teas, I could have easily whiled away October doing little else. The bottom line, it seems, is that the coming year in film looks dark, experimental and introspective: full of stories about individuals and their personal crises. Bring it on, I say.