Memoir movies have been among the screen’s masterworks, from Fellini’s Amarcord to Tarkovsky’s Mirror to Terence Davies’s anthems to a Liverpool childhood. Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès (), scenes from the life of a New Wave ancienne combatante (maker of Le Bonheur, Cleo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond), is irresistibly playful: a loose-leaf diary in which the pages are shuffled by instinct, wit and surreal art.

On reflection: ‘The Beaches of Agnès’

The beach strewn with mirrors – and Varda friends – is an inspired start. The place seems at once alien and recognisable: it is all our childhoods, a recollective littoral studded with mirage-images in which some memories stand brighter, larger or more complete than others and each memory throws back, when we pass it, our own portrait.

After that, the film is a succession of joyously ludic tableaux. “I’m playing the role of a plump little old lady telling her life story,” says the auteur (bizarrely resembling the late actress Lila Kedrova, possibly during a sitting for the late painter Beryl Cook). Following the Varda childhood we move from Belgian birthplace to Mediterranean coast – the French port of Sète – and then into a Paris of cinema, celebrity and first sightings of the future famous. The old photos have a mischievous, revelatory life. Is that really Gérard Depardieu, in the likeness of a luxuriantly tressed Adonis rather than an ageing beer barrel?

Chris Marker, doyen French director, appears as a cartoon cat. Jane Birkin pops up as croupier in a scene memorialising the casino death of Varda’s father, an over-keen gambler. The filmmaker and her interlocutors frequently walk backwards to indicate the reverse movement of memory. The film is that simple at times – antagonists may say silly – and yet that honest, whimsical and endearing. I especially like the revelation that Varda met an unknown Harrison Ford, while screen-testing youngsters for her US-made Lions Love, and advised him to give up acting. She was right, on her own terms. Ford has no place on Planet Varda, any more than Varda has on Planet America. It is irreconcilables like those that make life, and this movie, so rich.

Robert Guédiguian’s Army of Crime (), a truth-based drama of the French resistance, is less than the sum of its well-intentioned parts. Grave, heartfelt, medium-engrossing, it still feels like every resistance movie you have ever seen, rolled into a ball of historical revisionism.

Did we say “French”? Make that multi-ethnic. The film’s Nazi-fighters are a Paris-based band led by the Armenian writer Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian) and containing Jews, Hungarians, Poles, Italians and Spaniards. Think of Franco-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb’s Days of Glory – a kindred hymn to the debt owed by France to the foreign-born – and replace mixed-race battlefield fodder with plural-pedigree saboteurs on Seineside.

Guédiguian’s strength, as befits a broad-spectrum artist whose work spans local-colour genre movies (Marius and Jeanette) and political biopics (The Last Mitterrand), is in setting a wide frame for his story and filling it with busy people and plots. The weaknesses have the same source: too many characters, too little space to develop each. Dialogue is often reduced to signalling – “He’s an important Armenian poet” (Missak’s wife to information-needy newcomer) – and narrative development to speed-dialling. Were the band’s arrested members really tortured together in an open-plan cellar, live exhibits for visiting, pantomime-hissable Nazis?

The best scenes are the slowest, slyest and most particular: not least the near-comical conundrum of what to do with a grenade when you have aborted its use at the last moment but have already pulled – and cannot find on a dark street – the pin. Cut to a Manouchian who has sped back home to his wife still holding the deadly item: “I need a safety pin, a needle, anything...”

Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner

Ricky Gervais is now so famous in the US that his name no longer needs to be prefaced on chat shows with “the British comedian”. His comedy of depressive nuance is both unique and universal (which is close to a definition of genius). His clout has become so cosmic that he not only stars in The Invention of Lying (), he also co-wrote and co-directed it with an American unknown, Matthew Robinson, credited with the original idea.

In a picture-postcard parallel reality, lying does not exist. Restaurant waiters stand at your table saying, “I’m very embarrassed I work here.” The man in the Coca-Cola ad says, “I’m asking you to not stop buying it, that’s all. (Taking a sip) It’s a bit sweet.” Gervais is the podgy middle-ager working for “Lecture Films” – an outfit oddly making big-screen, award-winning historical education movies – who stumbles on lying as a dating ruse (with out-of-his-league brunette Jennifer Garner), then takes his invention further. Overheard improvising make-believe about an afterlife for his dying mum (Fionnula Flanagan), he is soon beatified as a prophet. A few days of razor-free reclusiveness at home, to escape the mob, and the inevitable happens. When he answers the door in a white bedsheet he is a chubby-fancier’s Jesus Christ.

The laughs rain down early on; later – Messiah moment apart – they thin to a drizzle, deprived of variation. Gervais/Robinson had a brilliant starting idea. Hollywood should then have said, “No, you can’t direct it too, we’ll get a pro.” The rhythm is too one-pace; the imaginary society needed more character and detailing; the mongrel mix of accents (American, cockney, Gervais’s lightly toasted English yokel) says “nowhere and everywhere”, which is not at all the same as “unique and universal”.

Pandorum (, Christian Alvart) is the title you use when you have exhausted every other neologism in the sci-fi imaginarium. The word exists in some parallel universe between Pandora’s box and pandemonium. We get the second – action mayhem full of gibbering hominoids, hanging corpses and a few live stars (Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster) running the cannibalism gauntlet in hyperspace – after we open up the first, a stranded space cruiser in the year Two-thousand-and-pick-a-high-number AD. “Let go of your petty idea of reality,” Quaid advises Foster and by extension the audience. No, thanks. My petty idea of reality got me where I am today. This film’s idea of reality – trash-apocalyptic and second-hand (Alien, Event Horizon) – will give it a few short weeks in cinemas and on DVD shelves.

Nia Vardalos, the star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, has lost weight, some of it, to judge by Driving Aphrodite (, Donald Petrie), from her brain. What ever made her sign on for this woeful comedy about an American tour guide (Vardalos) in Greece, learning to love her job as the national clichés converge – brash yanks, uptight Brits – and love beckons in the form of a hunky tour-bus driver (Alexis Georgoulis)? Think of Shirley Valentine and take away charm, wit, realism and Pauline Collins.