This year's Venice Film Festival will be marked as one in which a handful of British films delivered on their considerable promise.

Steve McQueen showed that his extraordinary debut, Hunger, was not a one-off; the ensemble of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a reminder that no nation has so much acting talent; and Andrea Arnold reinvented the book on Wuthering Heights with kids who had never acted in their lives.

Before all that, however, the festival opened with George Clooney’s political thriller The Ides Of March. In life, Clooney is quite the political animal, who many wish would have presidential ambitions; but here he plays a democratic governor and White House hopeful who isn’t quite as squeaky clean as he appears.

Set during a presidential primary in Ohio, the film charts the loss of political innocence of Ryan Gosling’s young press aide; Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti chew the scenery as rival campaign managers batting, in a way, for the boy’s soul. Though not particularly original in its machinations, it’s made with polish and panache.

Carnage, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s stage play The God Of Carnage, is an uproariously funny comedy of manners. Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C Reilly play the two couples who try to resolve the problem of their fighting children in an amicable manner, but are quickly at each other’s throats – proving that the kids are mini-sociopaths for a reason. Hypocrisy, prejudice and projectile vomiting are weapons in this bourgeois battlefield.

Alps is the second film by the talented Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose perverse tale of experimental parenting, Dogtooth, revitalised interest in his country’s cinema. This offers a similarly strange scenario, as a quartet of misfits hire themselves out as “substitutes” to people who have just lost loved ones. Elaborate role-playing as a means of assuaging grief and loneliness is a stretch, but Lanthimos derives a fascinating reflection on the roles we all play within family and society.

McQueen’s Shame is even more challenging, charting the life of a sex addict with an emotional rawness and physical raunchiness that set Venice alight. Michael Fassbender plays a New York businessman whose ordered existence – dull work by day; one-night stands, prostitutes and online porn by night – is thrown into disarray by the appearance of his chaotic sister (Carey Mulligan). Visually the film is mesmerising, McQueen suggesting in the minimalist control of his anti-hero’s well-heeled milieu the murky mess of his inner life. I have a feeling that Fassbender could be the dominant actor of the next decade.

The film adaptation of John Le Carre’s pre-eminent Cold War thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is impeccable. Gary Oldman’s Smiley holds its chilly centre superbly, while Colin Firth, John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Strong et al lend nuance at every turn.

Having made her name with the contemporary tales Red Road and Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold has taken on Wuthering Heights and transformed Emily Bronte’s gothic romance into a piece that feels like she’s written it herself; and that’s the sign of a determined auteur. Her treatment will be problematic for those who expect the over-ripe emotions of the original, while satisfying those who will admire its realist and sympathetic focus on the feral Heathcliffe’s miserable life.

Venice has had its high-profile disappointments, not least W.E., Madonna’s muddled account of the love affair between Edward VIII and the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Madonna clearly identifies with the demonised Simpson – and that’s the heart of the problem; this is well-dressed, but hardly artful. Yet Al Pacino’s Wilde Salome, a documentary that follows his obsession with Oscar Wilde’s play, is one of those grand follies that no festival-goer with a sense of irony should do without.