The Informant! Steven Soderbergh, 108 mins, (15)<br/>Glorious 39, Stephen Poliakoff, 129 mins, (12A)<br/>The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Chris Weitz, 130 Mins, (12A)

Classy directors and starry casts didn't save the first two releases; and nothing could save the third

It's ironic that Steven Soderbergh's new film should be called The Informant!, given that the director's primary tactic is to keep the audience as ill-informed as possible.

Based on a true story, the film gets going in the early 1990s, in the offices of an Illinois agri-chemical corporation. An ambitious if geeky executive, played by Matt Damon, is in charge of a process which keeps going wrong, and which is costing the company millions of dollars a month. To his bosses' amazement, Damon suddenly announces that he has the answer: a contact in a rival Japanese firm has tipped him off about a saboteur. And then when his bosses call in two FBI agents, Scott Bakula and Joel McHale, Damon goes even further, blurting out details of a price-fixing network that reaches around the world.

Is he being honest about the Japanese mole, or about the price-fixing, or about anything? Soderbergh isn't telling. We see a succession of secret meetings in hotel rooms, but none of them confirms what Damon actually knows, and even his voice-over is a tangential stream-of-consciousness, designed to leave us yet more confused.

In effect, we're watching proceedings from a distance. It's certainly a novel approach, but it stops the story engaging us either as an espionage thriller or as a comic caper: instead of investing in Damon's predicament, we're twiddling our thumbs and waiting to learn exactly what this man's predicament is.

There are a few distractions in the meantime. Quite apart from the fun of seeing Damon with a paunch and an unflattering moustache, there's Marvin Hamlisch's swinging, retro score, which sounds as if it was rejected by an Austin Powers film for being too wacky. But if you set those elements alongside the digressive voice-over, and the title's exclamation mark, it seems that Soderbergh doesn't trust the material to stand up without a scaffolding of postmodern gimmickry.

He needn't have worried. In fact, the film only comes to life in its later stretches, when he strips away the larky embellishments and lays out the mind-boggling truth. It's worth the wait, but only just.

Glorious 39 is Stephen Poliakoff's first cinema film in more than a decade – and it really should have been shown on television instead. It's not just that the languid pacing would have benefited from regular ad breaks and cups of tea. The key difference is that on the small screen, a new Poliakoff drama is seen as a major event: if we watched Glorious 39 at home, we'd be conditioned to luxuriate in its country-house settings, its ravishing couture, and a cast that's like a box of chocolates. On the big screen, neither the design nor the cast seem quite as dazzling, so viewers are more likely to spot the contrivances in the shadows.

The film opens just when the Second World War is about to break out – not that everyone thinks it will. An aristocratic MP, Bill Nighy, still hopes that a deal can be struck with Hitler, and that his family's sumptuous parties can continue uninterrupted. A younger MP, David Tennant, and a civil servant, Charlie Cox, are in Churchill's camp, while Nighy's adopted daughter, Romola Garai, isn't too bothered either way. She's a fledgling actress with a role in a film, and it's not until she stumbles on a stash of incriminating gramophone records that the war bears down on her charmed life. Julie Christie, Christopher Lee, Jeremy Northam and Jenny Agutter also appear, whether or not they're given anything to do.

With a cast as bounteous as that, and the rarefied atmosphere that Poliakoff invokes, it feels almost gauche to bring up so trifling a technicality as the plot, but Glorious 39 is a mystery that depends on a cabal of conspirators recording their treasonous meetings, leaving the recordings lying around, and then gruesomely murdering anyone who hears them, however close to the conspirators they might be. It's prestigious and serious-minded, but it's still nonsense.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon is the second film to be adapted from Stephanie Meyers' zillion-selling novels, and it's so tedious and stupid that it makes last year's Twilight seem like Nosferatu. The first instalment was a muted piece of teen wish-fulfilment about a hunky vampire (Robert Pattinson) falling in love with a lonely wallflower (Kristen Stewart). In New Moon, the vampire breaks up with her, so she mopes in her bedroom for months on end before another boy (Taylor Lautner) falls in love with her. And guess what? He's a werewolf. He and his buff buddies run around in the woods topless, like the Incredible Hulk's little brothers, turning into unconvincing, CGI mega-wolves whenever it suits them.

However maudlin and precious the tone might be, the story is still just daft enough to make you wonder who's going to fall in love with the morose heroine in Twilight Part Three. The Creature from the Black Lagoon?

Also Showing: 22/11/2009

The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (114 mins, 15)

This French box-office smash is a cleverly structured comedy drama which surveys a decade in the life of a family by focusing on five individual days. It's warm and tender, even though each of the five days is packed a little too tightly with fights, deaths and life-changing traumas.

Southern Softies (78 mins, U)

Low-low-budget spoof documentary which follows Graham Fellows, in the deadpan guise of John Shuttleworth, as he dodders around the Channel Islands. It's a niche comedy – and as niches go, it's a small one – but it's good for a few chuckles.

The Sea Wall (115 mins, TBC)

Handsome but not very gripping melodrama set in Cambodia in 1931. Isabelle Huppert stars as a widow with two teenage children who's struggling to keep her rice plantation out of the clutches of the Pacific, and of her fellow colonialists.

Examined Life (87 mins, TBC)

A genial philosophy primer. Ten academics have 10 minutes each to stroll through parks, city streets and airports, expounding their pet theories.