Some of the biggest names in world cinema are previewing their latest releases at the 51st Times London Film Festival. Taiwan's Ang Lee returns to Shanghai under Japanese occupation for the wartime spy thriller Lust, Caution (pictured), while fellow countryman Hou Hsiao-hsien heads to Paris for Flight of the Red Balloon, which features a splendid display of blonde ditziness from Juliette Binoche, as the puppet show producer who's so wrapped up in her myriad problems that she entrusts her young son to film student-cum-nanny, Song Fang. And completing the trio of Asian auteurs is Takeshi Kitano, who lampoons his entire oeuvre in Glory to the Filmmaker!, in which he also stars as a blocked director who realises that his career has been a complete waste of time.

Also worth seeking out is Wang Quan's Tuya's Marriage, the winner of Berlin's Golden Bear, which follows Mongolian shepherdess Yu Nan as she debates whether to divorce her disabled husband and marry again for the sake of her sheep and kids. The best laid nuptial plans also go awry in Hiner Saleen's DOL - The Valley of Tambourines, which follows groom Belçim Bilgin as he seeks sanctuary with a Kurdish guerilla band after a Turkish officer is killed during a skirmish on the border between Iraq and Iran.

As ever, the Latin American contribution is enviably strong, with Mexican Carlos Reygadas bolstering his reputation for intense poeticism in Silent Light and Paulo Morelli reinforcing the terrifying image of Rio's violent favelas in City of Men. However, a gentler side of the Latin temperament emerges in Enrique Fernández and César Charlone's delightful El Baño del Papa, in which a smuggler along the border between Uruguay and Brazil hits upon the idea of building a toilet in his garden and charging people to use it during Pope John Paul II's visit to his home town in 1988.

Eastern European cinema is still learning to live without state subsidies. But the fact that a Romanian film won this year's Palme d'or is testament to the progress being made and Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days heads the LFF's excellent selection of continental cinema.

Set in an all-female dormitory in the 1980s, this is a gruelling study of state chauvinism that follows Anamaria Marinca as she helps her pregnant friend, Laura Vasiliu, arrange an illegal abortion. The mood is one of unflinching realism. But, by confining the action to a single night, Mungiu also generates an unbearable tension that reaches its zenith as Marinca dines with her boyfriend's family, while Vasiliu waits in a hotel room for her 'treatment' to take effect.

The everyday is coated with some disarming feel-good in Jan Sverak's Empties, which charts the progress of Zdenek Sverak, after he resigns from his post as a teacher and begins working in the bottle bank at the local supermarket. This bittersweet insight into the Czech psyche finds echo in Pole Krzysztof Krauze's tale of struggle and discord, Saviour's Square, as Jowita Budnik's family begins to fall apart after husband Arkadiusz Janiczek loses their savings in a property scam and they're forced to move in with her disapproving mother-in-law, Ewa Wencel.

Three of Russia's finest film-makers have new features on view - Alexander Sokurov (Alexandra), Andrei Zviaguintsev (The Banishment) and Alexei Balabanov (Cargo 200). Yet while each captures the harshness of life before and after the disintegration of the USSR, it's Ulrich Seidl who presents the most acute assessment of the dubious benefits of freedom in Import Export, which sees Ukrainian nurse Ekateryna Rak suppressing her professional instincts while working as a cleaner on an Austrian geriatric ward, while Viennese security guard Paul Hofmann hooks up with shady stepfather Michael Thomas to service fruit machines in the desolate backwaters of the Ukraine.

Fatih Akin's take on the migrant's lot is equally shrewd in The Edge of Heaven, a densely plotted drama in which the friendship between a widower and a prostitute has far-reaching consequences for his son and her daughter. However, the problems besetting the characters are markedly less conventional in Roy Andersson's You, the Living, an offbeat Swedish comedy that suggests there's more than just random absurdity linking our unfathomable fates.

Jacques Rivette is one of many French film-makers in LFF 2007 taking inspiration from a literary classic. Don't Touch the Axe adheres closely to Honoré de Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais, but what's most noticeable about this account of the rivalry between Napoleonic general Guillaume Depardieu and coquette Jeanne Balibar is the theatricality employed by this most cinematic of auteurs, which not only reinforces the gaudy glamour of Restoration Paris, but also emphasises the wit on which Balibar's salon darling relies to out-manoeuvre her gauche, besotted suitor.

Despite its artifice, this is anything but a throwback to the Tradition of Quality that preceded the nouvelle vague and Catherine Breillat similarly skirts pictorialism in her version of Barbey d'Aurevilly's 1850s novel The Last Mistress. Again, polite society is shown to be anything but, as Spanish courtesan Asia Argento exploits costumes and coiffures to drive a wedge between the amoral Fu'ad Aït Aattou and his bride, Roxanne Mesquida. But Breillat isn't content simply to stage a melodrama. This is a typically fierce and exacting study of the psychological and carnal differences between the sexes.