All the highlights from this year’s lineup – including Mr Tom Ford’s second film Nocturnal Animals, and Mr Ryan Gosling and Ms Emma Stone in the all-singing, all-dancing La La Land.

Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, the BFI London Film Festival returns this October with an incredible range of movies – from the best Hollywood has to offer, to the most celebrated films from Cannes and the arthouse circuit, to new documentaries and low-budget genre movies that have inspired breathless reviews. Great names, silent for too long, are using the festival to re-announce, and, in many cases, reinvent themselves. And for the big hitters, the festival is an opportunity to position themselves for the Academy Awards.

But what should you see? Out of the hundreds of screenings on offer, which are the best movies and the hottest tickets in town? Here are MR PORTER’s top tips for the festival.

Director: Mr Damien Chazelle Cast: Mr Ryan Gosling, Ms Emma Stone, Mr John Legend

Take yourselves back to 2014. Not many people had heard of Mr Damien Chazelle. Then came Whiplash. The film, written and directed by Mr Chazelle, was said to be based on his own experience of being a high-school jazz drummer with an overly-competitive dad. After a much-buzzed premiere at Sundance in 2014, it became the London Film Festival’s Accenture Gala selection that year. You may know what happened next. Critic lavished praise on Whiplash, as well as Mr Miles Teller’s performance in it, and the film took more than 10 times its budget at the box office.

This year, Mr Chazelle returns with La La Land, the most anticipated film of the entire festival, a musical romance about first love and sorrow, communicated through showtunes and free jazz. Starring Mr Ryan Gosling and Ms Emma Stone, arguably the most in-demand performers in Tinseltown, this homage to the Broadway-inspired, colour-drenched movie musicals, such a staple of Hollywood’s Golden Era, looks a dead cert for viral box office success. See it here first.

Director: Mr Denis Villeneuve Cast: Ms Amy Adams, Mr Jeremy Renner, Mr Forest Whitaker

Of the new generation of emergent indie filmmakers to be embraced by the studio system, Mr Denis Villeneuve is way out in front of the pack. The Quebec-born director of Prisoners, Enemy and Sicario has been trusted with the almost-impossible job of making a sequel to Blade Runner. But first, he has paved the way with a science-fiction of huge scope, craft and complexity. Starting with the age-old question of the genre – when aliens land on Earth, what should we do? – Arrival will no doubt be a big contender during awards season. His first major accolades could come here.

Director: Mr Tom Ford Cast: Ms Amy Adams, Mr Jake Gyllenhaal, Mr Michael Shannon

Almost a decade after the Oscar-winning A Single Man, fashion designer turned director Mr Tom Ford returns to the cinema. Nocturnal Animals has been adapted by Mr Ford from the 1993 novel Tony And Susan by Mr Austin Wright. It’s a noirish mystery thriller that feels distinctly less posed, less self-conscious than his debut, and all the better for it. A framing narrative in Los Angeles gives way to a Texan pot-boiler, ostensibly based on an unread crime manuscript by Mr Jake Gyllenhaal’s young writer. This is an intense, violent and unflinching film about revenge and malice. Hoorah for Mr Ford.

Director: Mr Werner Herzog

On October 29, 1969, at the University of California, Los Angeles, student Mr Charley Kline tried to transmit the text “login” to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute over the first link on the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet. He sent letters “l” and “o” before the system crashed. The first message ever sent on the internet, therefore, was “lo” – lo and behold. Inspired by this story, Mr Herzog flew all over the world to meet people and visit places that epitomize how much the internet has infiltrated our lives, resulting in this grandly titled film. Separating his exegesis into 10 chapters, the Bavarian documentarian poses questions that might never normally occur to us – are we already in a global cyber war, without realising it? Have you ever heard of a solar flare, an eruption of radiation from our sun that, from one moment to the next, would render every connected device on the planet inert? It may not have high-wattage star power, but this is one of the most thoughtful, powerful films of the year. The screening at LFF is bound to be a joyous occassion, for the festival has had a long love-affair with the unique and brilliant Mr Werner Herzog.

Director: Mr Olivier Assayas Cast: Ms Kristen Stewart

In her second collaboration with the expansive French director Mr Olivier Assayas, after the frankly awful Clouds Of Sils Maria, Ms Kristen Stewart returns to the festival with what might be the performance of her already stratospheric career. She plays Maureen, a young American in Paris, employed as personal assistant, and fashion shopper extraordinaire, to The Devil Wears Prada-esque Kyra (Ms Nora Von Waltstätten). But, at night, we learn that Maureen is also capable of contacting the dead, and is attempting to reconnect with her late twin brother Lewis, by wandering through the Parisian house they grew up in – and in which he died – and calling his name. Stewart will forever be freighted by the Twilight series that gave her such fame. But she is, in fact, one of the most accomplished performers in cinema – strangely capable of staying at an inscrutable remove yet almost constantly on the edge of letting forth a river of emotion. Mr Assayas has crafted the perfect vessel for her talents: a strange, tense and audacious performance, in a film that might very well mark the start of her career as a truly respected artist.

The 60th BFI London Film Festival will take place 5-16 October 2016.