Millions, the perfect Christmas movie, arrives seven months before Christmas. We have heard of early posting, but this is ridiculous. Then again, perhaps it is strategic. By opening now, Danny Boyle's toughly enchanting childhood fable, written by the versatile Frank Cottrell Boyce (of Michael Winterbottom's The Claim and In This Life), will avoid drowning in the mawkish moonshine that passes each year for Yuletide entertainment.

The tale of two young brothers in northern England discovering a sack of cash by the railside - £230,000, though on the imaginary eve of €-Day (euro conversion) they need to change it fast into €350,000 - becomes a debate over whether money is the root of evil, the means of doing good, or both at once: a curse molecularly bonded to a benediction.

The nine-year-old younger boy, irresistibly played by the newcomer Alex Etel, is a wonder-eyed miniature mystic, who not only talks about saints but also hallucinates them. ("Should you be doing that?" he asks a spliff-smoking St Clare of Assisi, who visits him in his cardboard hide-away by the rail tracks). The older brother (Lewis McGibbon) is a pure and driven materialist, for whom the purpose of money is to hoover up expensive hi-fi goods. Meanwhile their widowered dad (James Nesbitt), no less covetous, has his greed cramped a little by a Christmas romance with an Emma-Thompson-look-alike charity worker (Daisy Donovan), first seen distracting the school with a Dalek-voiced wheely bin that gobbles up pocket-money contributions.

Boyle and the cameraman Anthony Dod Mantle (usually found in Denmark lensing Dogme films) create a weightless wonderwork that will please the whole family. Millions is full of gravity-defying aerial shots, even inside houses, and glowing colours that move about the screen like incandescent blobs in a magical lava lamp. Boyle's best film since Trainspotting has his signature psychedelia, but also a simplicity and humour that freshen each scene and supporting character. My favourite was the new town's community cop (Pearce Quigley), a bad news bearer whose every awful warning - "Statistically, you're going to be burgled," he tells the new home-owners - is accompanied by a winning, well-meaning smile.

Paolo Sorrentino's mordantly beguiling The Consequences of Love is like a lost, or possibly forsaken, Nabokov novel. My fantasy theory is that the Italian filmmaker found a manuscript in the snow, ejected from a hotel window in Montreux (a place so quiet you could hear a Pnin drop), and came back to Switzerland decades after the novelist's death to film it.

What hero could be more Nabokovian than a repressed, suited, 50-year-old apparent businessman (Toni Servillo) trapped in a life of low-energy obsession-compulsion in a Swiss lakeside hotel? The obsessions of Titta di Girolamo (even the eccentric, birdlike name is Nabokovian) are neatness, routine, introspection and - belatedly and fatally - the hotel bar girl (Olivia Magnani). His compulsion is to believe there must be some existence beyond this, but he is not sure he wants to encounter it.

He works as a Mafia money-launderer, though under duress. His life is stolen from him and he wants it back. Yet imprisonment in a luxury hotel has become a non-onerous addiction, like the weekly heroin shot Titta allows himself each Wednesday morning. Servillo, who looks like a cross between Jean-Luc Godard and the former British defence secretary John Nott, plays him with sepulchral wit, never more winning than when behaving with polite but insistent hostility to everyone who invades his space in the hotel lounge.

Sorrentino directs like a human surveillance device, with baroque swoops across polished floors, weird craning ascensions behind the hero's neck and transfixed, obsidian close-ups. Finally the camera stands back - well back - to observe the act of martyrdom for which Titta has been rehearsing for 100 minutes, or eight years, whichever time-scale applies in the land of Sorrentino-Nabokovia.

With English-subtitled and English-dubbed prints of The Cat Returns, a Japanese animation feature, showing in side-by-side preview theatres, I watched half of each. Both versions are good. The voice of Hollywood's Anne Hathaway is a far from second-best bet as the heroine who saves a cat from an oncoming car, then learns he is the prince of Cat Kingdom. She is invited on a visit - though cats talking, politicking, wearing clothes and walking on two legs are not to all tastes - and is offered the prince's hand in marriage. A human cannot marry a feline, she protests! The King solves this by turning her into a cat.

If you loved Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away - and you would have to have been dead or insane not to - you will love this. The great Hayao Miyazaki did not direct, although the film is called a "Miyazaki project". But he clearly taught Hiroyuki Morita a thing or three: how to lend simple visual ideas a spooky enchantment, how sweet-faced heroines can also be as feisty as Lewis Carroll's Alice, how to give two-dimensional cartooning enough visual wallop to show Pixar that they are not the only royalty in the animation kingdom.

House of Wax, a screaming-teen remake of the 1953 Vincent Price shocker (the only three-dimensional film ever directed by a one-eyed man, André De Toth), is scary mainly for Paris Hilton. For an hour she is kept on hold as a murder victim while better actors perish, victims of a mad wax-museum owner in a ghost town "off the main highway". We have a frightened suspicion that Paris may survive to the end, going on to punish us blood-lusting viewers by taking away our Hilton Honours points. Then, just in time, a steel rod comes hurtling through the dark ...

The producers Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis again vulgarise an old horror vehicle. (Prior convictions include Thirteen Ghosts and House on Haunted Hill). This time, though, there is a certain grandeur to the gaga-ness. The director Jaume Collet-Serra and the designer Graham Walker give the ghost town an art deco look, like some diner/drive-in hamlet that time forgot, refreshing eyes weary with studio Gothic. And the sight of one victim-turned-exhibit tenaciously playing a museum piano, while his living eyes dart about behind the wax, provides a rare combination of the kitsch and bloodcurdling.

In Mondays in the Sun a group of Spanish barflies, laid off from a shipyard, yatter on about life, death and the meaning of existence. Festooned with prizes in its native land, the film is as sombrely logorrhoeic as The Sea Inside. Do Spaniards confuse this with art? As the long days turn to longer nights - with every scene photographed in a sludgy murk - I felt I was watching a Galician version of The Iceman Cometh, except that even O'Neill had jokes, and he certainly had a eloquence and emotional power that are absent here.

Space is too short, and life also, for It's All Gone Pete Tong (15, Michael Dowse, ) or The Pacifier (PG, Adam Shankman, ). The first, a British mockumentary about a deaf DJ (Paul Kaye), heads for pathos after giving up on comedy. The second is a Disney comedy starring Vin Diesel, bodyguarding a bunch of children in that last cinematic refuge for Hollywood strongmen, the kidcom.