Taxi Tehran is Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s third film since the 2010 prohibition that, among other restrictions, forbade him from working in cinema for 20 years. While its very existence may count as an achievement in itself, much more importantly it’s also a lovingly cheeky riposte to those who have restricted his freedom of thought (and movement), as well as a reflection on narrative and how it is created.

To create this strikingly original portrait of the man some (though not Frank Sinatra) liked to call "the greatest movie actor of all time", writer/director Stevan Riley has plundered a remarkable trove of Brando's own audio recordings and used them to create a kind of self-narrating autobiography. The notion that we're hearing Brando telling his own story from some post-corporeal ether is reinforced by the device of opening the film with a computerised 3D talking head, based on a digital image of Brando's own head made in the 1980s.

As further proof that films in a lower-key can often land with the greatest impact, along comes Mississippi Grind, a casually mournful, beautifully made road movie that is perhaps best described as the picture that Robert Altman didn't live to make. A conscious throwback to the era of Altman's California Split, this latest from the writer-director team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden locates an almost Chekhovian melancholy in its portrait of two gambling men, drifters both, in search of an actual and metaphoric pay-off from life. 

As unforced in its telling as the neatly arrived-at rapport between leading men Ryan Reynolds and the wonderful Ben Mendelsohn, the movie is likely to be swamped by bigger, noisier titles from every side, but its quiet virtues seem guaranteed to endure. 

To be sure, the picaresque quality to the script may frustrate those who want more overt juice from a journey whose origins in an earlier celluloid age are directly referenced by the appearance of veteran director James Toback in a vivid cameo – Toback having written the 1974 Karel Reisz/James Caan film The Gambler that was recently remade (to poor reviews) with Mark Wahlberg in the lead. As was evident in the filmmakers' previous collaboration, Half Nelson, which brought Ryan Gosling a 2007 Oscar nod, Boden and Fleck prefer gently inflected observation to manufactured Big Moments, and the results are all the better for it. 

Gerry (Mendelsohn, sporting not a trace of his native Australian accent) and Curtis (Reynolds) enter one another's lives at a poker table in Dubuque, the American economy being debated on TV in the background while the two men attempt to boost their own personal fortunes. Before long, their easeful banter finds them taking off together for a drive south to New Orleans, their need to re-connect representing the highest stakes of all. The pair's route lead them towards various women who have figured in their lives, among whom Robin Weigert stands out as the inevitably cautious mother of a daughter whom ex-husband Gerry says is seven – or maybe six: significantly, her father isn't quite sure which it is. Nor are facts, one senses, as important as the feeling the men come to share that they might in fact be talismanic for one another, Gerry admiring Curtis's unexpected emergence in his life as "a big handsome leprechaun", which isn't a bad way of characterising this underrated actor's allure. 

Is their car ride an emblem of freedom or escape – are they merely absolving themselves of social obligations by flooring the accelerator and leaving the responsibilities that come with adulthood behind? Mississippi Grind to its credit doesn't cast judgement. Instead, it allows the actors to draw their own complete, composite portraits of a pair for whom the necessary posturing that comes with gambling only goes so far. "I'm not a good person," Gerry tells Curtis, Mendelsohn turning suddenly sad-eyed as if to suggest a cumulative regret he will never be able to voice. The film may take its title from a horse at the racetrack that may or may not be a good bet, but when it comes to gradually laying bare a character's inner life, Mendelsohn really does rank among the best.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Mississippi Grind 

The title sequence of Bond number 24 is a bit of a nightmare, with Sam Smith's mawkishly insipid theme song playing over a queasy title sequence featuring a hideous giant octopus, but the traditional opening mini-movie is an explosive chain reaction which doesn't disappoint. This takes us to Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, where Daniel Craig's ghoulishly attired Bond is on a mission to take out a chap called Sciarra.

Lance Armstrong's spectacular crash-and-burn makes for gripping stuff in The Program, the story of the sports legend-cum-druggie who cycled too close to the sun and went on to pay the hubris-laden price. And as a star vehicle for Ben Foster, Stephen Frears's latest film not only serves as a reminder of this director's singular way with actors (note the performances that have gone the Oscar route under his watch) but makes one wonder why his young American lead hasn't yet entered Hollywood's inner sanctum when he so clearly has the stuff.

Yorgos Lanthimos is the director who reinvigorated Greek cinema with his dark, absurdist films Dogtooth and Alps. His English-language debut is even more off the charts, yet also the most familiar; after all, it is essentially a love story. 

Israeli director Mor Loushy's documentary Censored Voices grapples with the weight of history. It draws on interviews taken by the future writer Amos Oz with Israeli soldiers immediately after the end of the Six Day War in 1967 which were heavily censored at the time by the Israeli army, with only around 30% of the resulting material subsequently published in a book by Oz’s colleague Avraham Shapira, The Seventh Day.

Suffragette is exemplary in its attempt to depict the harrowing experiences of the British women who risked their lives to win the vote. It depicts the awakening of a reluctant recruit who becomes a militant, and graphically depicts the violence meted out to the protestors and hunger strikers in the critical years of 1912-13, potently drawing parallels with the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike and the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strikes.

How do you corral 250 films in a way which makes sense to potential viewers? Major releases – so far at this year’s LFF we've had Suffragette, Johnny Depp in Black Mass and Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van – pretty much take care of themselves. For the mostly unknown rest, festival director Clare Stewart introduced themed strands in 2012 with the stated aim of making the festival “much easier to navigate”.

"I just wanna know what I'm getting into," states FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), not unreasonably, as she heads blindly down the rabbit hole. She emerges into a lawless land where bad guys rule, police fearfully follow and her own side's principles have become unrecognisably warped, with their tactics questionable and objectives increasingly hard to grasp. Sicario is a nail-bitingly tense, precision-crafted and ferociously critical look at the US war on drugs from French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Enemy, Prisoners).