It is back: an event so rich, so teeming, so packed with action, passion and reflection that you are caught between wanting to attend each of the 300-plus feature films and shorts and wanting to give up in despair and go into hibernation. The annual arrival of the London Film Festival always makes me remember the advice of an uncle to whom I once, as a child, communicated my horror of art galleries. So many paintings (I wailed)! So much walking and stopping and staring! He said, "Just go and look at one picture."

Brilliant. From that you can graduate to two, three, four. It is cold turkey in reverse, dosing upwards instead of downwards. Just so with the London Film Festival. If you feel there are too many movies, just mark your cards - initially at least - with those you are actively keen to see.

Is there any way for the festival directorate to make the selection more approachable? Should it imply cogency where there may be none?

"A festival of this scale can't ever be reduced to a handful of themes," writes LFF director Sandra Hebron in her booklet, while also saying: "Thinking about this year's programme, three words keep floating to the fore: history, memory, politics."

She is right. A festival's films never have anything in common; at the same time they have everything in common. At some substratal level every film made in 2008 has the same DNA, even if the naked intelligence only discerns a few of these kinships and convergences.

Memory and remembrance have certainly been ubiquitous motifs this year. What made so many filmmakers look back? Was it the birthday celebrations for 1968, life re-beginning at 40 for the ghost of the famous year of mass revolution? Or was it the grim rush with which so many baby-boomer directors (not to mention critics) are reaching a supposed age of wisdom and seniority, when looking back offers a larger view than looking forward?

In 2008 we have been invited to remember the Irish hunger strikes in Steve McQueen's powerful Hunger; the fall of a political super-demon in Ron Howard's festival-opening Frost/Nixon (from Peter Morgan's stage play); the slaughters of the first Israeli-Lebanese war in Ari Folman's brilliantly unsettling animation feature Waltz with Bashir; as well as the horror years of the Red Army Faction in The Baader Meinhof Complex, a tabloid reality thriller with, for its native Germany, the most seismic box-office impact of the year (see below).

The political blends with the personal in two powerful films that chronicle a country's history through the story of an individual. Haile Gerima's Teza, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, is a burnished epic of Ethiopan remembrance. A country's tyrannies are projected through the mind's eyes of a former exile, nursing his wounds and memories in his home village. In Hearts of Fire, set in Eritrea, child soldiers are the "heroes" through whose ordeals we experience a 27-year-old war.

Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City, from China, mixes fact, fiction and faux documentary as it tells the decades-spanning story of a giant weapons and aeronautics factory, passed from one political master to the next while its personnel (some played by actors in scripted monologues) tell their stories, poignant or polemical. All documentary and no faux is the great French filmmaker Raymond Depardon's La Vie Moderne, tragic yet at times grimly droll as it interviews a series of peasant farmers in the Haut-Garonne about the dying tradition of family farming.

For memory pure and personal, there are Terence Davies's Of Time and the City and Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès: two superb memoir-movies proving that some directors are best when talking simply - or at lyrical length and with imaginative depth - about themselves.

An international film festival today is increasingly just that. Forget the era when "international" meant a roundup of the usual suspects, the G7 of world moviedom. America, France, Italy, Britain, Japan. Today, if you stand on a street corner in Cannes, Venice or Sundance, nearly every nation will pass before your eyes, each carrying its tall pile of movie cans. No apologies are needed for or from these once-thought-underdeveloped movie nations. To believe me, check out Jay from the Philippines, caustic and cautionary, the best film made anywhere about the perfidies of reality television. Make a date with Tulpan from Kazakhstan, a desert tale of struggling families and ill-starred courtship that constitutes a riposte to the Borat Theory of Kazakh cultural barrenness.

Inevitably there are films I would never have had near my wish-list if I were a festival director: Ferzan Ozpetek's A Perfect Day (soporific political drama), Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche New York (crash-and-burn allegorical comedy) or the portmanteau movie Tokyo!, three shaggy dog stories in search of some bark and bite. And is it really the LFF's job to hold a promotional gala of the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace? Can't the hero with the double zero in his moniker and the octuple zero in his expected box-office revenue look after himself?

Never mind. Much striking-out and asterisking-in, with a pen and an LFF brochure, will secure a wise use of time and energy. Don't forget the personal lectures and appearances (screenwriter Peter Morgan, director Danny Boyle, Frost/Nixon star Michael Sheen) or the revamped classics (Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, Kevin Brownlow's Winstanley).

And don't forget to take a bottle of water to each screening. The heat from several hundred movie-maniacs in one room, all with their motors running, can be powerfully dehydrating.

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A passion for self-examination on screen

"Better late than never," sceptics cry as modern German cinema chases down its country's history. Showing a zeal for self-examination on screen that was missing for some 30 years after the second world war, the nation has recently given us Downfall (last days of Hitler), The Lives of Others (surveillance heyday of East Germany) and now The Baader Meinhof Complex, a headlong gallop through the days of the Red Army Faction.

If you were alive and sentient in the 1970s you will remember the bombings of newspaper offices, the murders or kidnappings of politicians, the hijacking of a plane by new-generation RAF loyalists hoping to free their mentors from jail. For close on 10 years, with guns and bombs, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof led or inspired an anarcho-Marxist resistance against western imperialism (America in Vietnam, Israel in former Palestine) and the perceived connivance of Germany. At times, much of Europe shook in its boots. Who would be gunned down next or blown up? What had happened to Flower Power and the hippy dream? Had its holistic togetherness morphed into this youth culture bent on tearing us all limb from limb?

The story is almost certainly too complicated to tell in a single feature, but director Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Christiane F) and screenwriter-producer Bernd Eichinger (Downfall) have a go anyway. For the first half of the 2½ hours, it is like being attacked by a riot squad of plots and subplots. The rush of reportage is sometimes invigorating, more often maddening in its determination to cut corners or to screech around them on one wheel. Character is simplified, as are character changes. Moritz Bleibtreu's Baader is a ranting pocket demagogue with sexism issues, who assails Ulrike Meinhof and her political sisters with the C-word or German equivalent. Martina Gedeck's Ulrike comes from another gene pool: learned, logical and motherly, at least until she agrees, in a sudden peripateia typical of the film, to orphan her children for the greater revolutionary good.

Everything improves when the pair and their main comrades go behind bars. In Stuttgart-Stammheim prison they and the film stop running about. Tensions and fallings-out are introduced more subtly, more illuminatingly, in the white laboratory-like spaces. Voiceovers drawn from the gang's diaries lend a breath of authenticity. The deaths in custody of the group's leaders - suicides or state-ordered killings? - are left properly ambiguous. Although the film's last word is left to a character insisting that Meinhof, Baader and the others took their own lives, that gesture towards demythologisation is countervailed by the wail of Bob Dylan behind the final credits.

So were the RAF a menace to western society? Or were they part of the 60s/70s freedom movement? Pay your money, make your choice. German filmgoers have paid their money, storming turnstiles and stoking debates in the national newspapers. Good, bad or indifferent - and The Baader Meinhof Complex is sometimes all three at once - the autopsies on its history that modern German cinema is beginning to undertake are overdue. These films should be required viewing from Bremen to Bavaria. They should also be set cinema for Europeans anxious to know how a population can fall victim - in any age - to a viral minority with a passionate cause. At heart and at mind, Baader and Meinhof were Fascism redivivus: brutal, simplistic, messianic. Their mistake as a movement was to forget to accompany their bomb offensive with a charm offensive. If they had, it might have been back to the Third Reich, or forward to the Fourth, for all of us.

'The Baader Meinhof Complex' is showing in London on October 26 and 28.

The London Film Festival runs from October 15-30. Full programme details from www.bfi.org.uk/lff