A brief report of the first two months of the movie calendar, Oscars exempted:

Chandni Chowk to China, soon to be released on DVD, is a noisy genre mash-up that doesn’t blend martial arts and slapstick so much as grate them into a lumpy soup. Akshay Kumar plays the hapless hero, a sort of Indian Jim Carrey, while Gordon Liu glares icily as a villainous kung fu master terrorizing a Chinese village. Much to the film’s detriment, Jackie Chan is nowhere to be seen. Those already attuned to that peculiar brand of Hindi cinema known as the Bollywood film may find a fart gag here or a dance number there to be a fair return on their time. Others should be far less charitable. If the broad comic shtick doesn’t frighten people away, the grotesque length of the thing—a whopping 155 minutes—almost certainly will.

Of Time and the City, which by contrast runs a polite 72 minutes, skipped town before anybody knew it was playing. Directed by English auteur Terence Davies, the film is a wistful documentary-essay woven together from several decades’ worth of archival footage. Its topic, full of anthropological interest, is how environment shapes the individual. More specifically, it’s about how Liverpool shaped Terence Davies. (He was born and raised there in the days following World War II.) Because the director himself provides the declamatory narration, the film resembles an extravagant home movie, albeit one with a fair amount of poetic force. It’s the personal nature of the thing—the distant, grimy, autobiographical spirit of the thing—that will drive most people away. Those forgiving of the snide attacks on the Roman Catholic Church, Tory values, and Beatles music will be rewarded with a reflective and thought-provoking final few minutes.

The Class, a top prizewinner at Cannes, is eminently recommendable to the brave men and women in the teaching profession, although its devotion to realism may hit too close to home. Armed with a handheld camera and a deep affection for human behavior, director Laurent Cantet takes us through a year of junior high French in a Parisian public school. No other film captures the jittery atmosphere of the classroom in quite the same way. Not only do we observe the students’ confusion and insecurities, but also the joy they experience when something clicks. Few moments are wasted—the documentary-like approach commands full attention. Francois Begaudeau co-wrote the screenplay out of his own memoirs, and he himself plays the schoolteacher with serene assurance. The pupils, a diverse group of French-speaking teenagers, are coached so well you soon forget you are watching actors.

Coraline is a crisply animated 3-D feature in the Tim Burton style, which by definition must contain one or more of the following ingredients: imaginative, socially awkward children, intimidating, otherworldly adults, talking animals, a decaying Victorian house, a morbid sense of humor, a gloomy grasp of beauty. Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel supplies the source material, and it seems to have been selected by director Henry Selick solely for its visual possibilities. It’s chock full of symbols devoid of meaning, and the nastiness of the central premise—a Lewis Carroll-like fantasy about a monstrous, controlling mother—is draining. Too dark for the little ones, too juvenile for the grown ones, it inspires a feeling of exasperation that so much artistry has been poured into something so trivial.   

Confessions of a Shopaholic sees the promotion of Isla Fisher, a heretofore minor player, to her first major role. While she’s not a natural comic like her costars Julie Hagerty and Joan Cusack, she occasionally resembles a lively Lucille Ball. (Must be the red hair.) The movie is a broad comedy that spills over into chick flick territory, having to do with a hopeful fashion writer addicted to material possessions, particularly clothes and accessories. (Extra points for its well-timed relevance to the plummeting economy.) As directed by P.J. Hogan, it has only a few notes, but it plays them with gusto. Some might find it a bit on the shrill side.

The International is an example of a director with flair (Tom Tykwer) working with so-so material (a script by first-time writer Eric Singer). It stars Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, and considering their attractiveness there’s an astonishing lack of sexual tension. The plot is a capitalist critique posing as an exotic thriller, with set pieces in New York, Berlin, Milan, and Istanbul. Tykwer gives it his all, finding inventive ways of shooting the chicly designed architecture, a gift that finds full force in a show-stopping shootout in the circular staircases of the Guggenheim Museum. Nothing else in the film remotely lives up to this gruelingly exciting centerpiece, well worth the trouble of wading through the murky intrigue.

Gomorrah, a film by Matteo Garrone, has already been overpraised for its social realism, although it offers an authentically gritty portrait of organized crime. The title is a play on “Camorra,” the oldest criminal organization in Italy, whose drug trafficking and racketeering have corrupted an entire region of Italy. Several small narratives interweave, forming a convincing tapestry of sin and vice, and Garrone’s tight control over the material keeps you in a state of nervous anticipation. Still, there is no evidence of an overarching vision, and the film gradually betrays its emptiness. One or two crises of conscience for the characters do not add up to a worldview.