Typical. You wait all decade for a period comedy about a pudgy, middle-aged Jewish cuckold searching for solace in a spiritually comfortless world – and then just as you had given up all hope, two come along at once. Admittedly, one of them – Joseph Strick’s Ulysses () – is a reissue, but a rare reissue of a forgotten film. Strick reworks Joyce’s novel into a farce about sexual frustration and religious intolerance, while retaining an impressive amount of Joyce’s structure, dialogue and narration. Milo O’Shea is rumpled and funny-sad as Leopold Bloom, a father figure looking for a son; Maurice Roëves is downcast and lantern-jawed as Stephen Dedalus, a son figure looking for a father. But best of all is Barbara Jefford, playing Bloom’s straying wife Molly, who delivers the novel’s long closing soliloquy. It begins and ends with the word “Yes”, and like much of this amiable, affecting and garrulous 1967 film, prompts a similar response from the viewer.

The best new film on offer, by some way, is A Serious Man (), another impudent and exquisitely engineered comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen.

Terrific blank: Michael Stuhlbarg

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), the film’s Bloom figure, is a luckless physics professor adrift in late-1960s Minnesota. Pot-smoking teenagers are coming of age while Larry is going to pot. His wife (Sari Lennick) is leaving him for a pompous widower (Fred Melamed); his jobless, troubled brother (Richard Kind) is suffering from a herbaceous cyst and has taken up semi-permanent residence in the family bathroom.

Things aren’t much rosier at work. Larry is being bribed – or else blackmailed – by a Korean student (David Kang), and the tenure committee is receiving anonymous letters tarnishing his name. He resolves to embark on a quest for meaning but this gets him nowhere. The junior rabbis (Simon Helberg, George Wyner) lead him up the garden path with metaphors and fables, while the revered senior rabbi refuses to see him.

The Coen Brothers are the only filmmakers gutsy enough to throw Jefferson Airplane and Kabbalah into the same pot – and the only filmmakers witty enough to make the concoction work. Their sadism helps things along. The film is a succession of worst-case scenarios in which Larry suffers the consequences of actions committed by others or accidents suggesting a divine hand. Stuhlbarg is a terrific blank in the lead role, and the various rabbis, lawyers, students and schoolchildren are ideally cast. The only thing keeping the film from perfection is the Coen Brothers’ taste for callow stereotyping and low physical comedy, suitable enough in a farce such as their previous film, Burn After Reading, but ill-advised and unnecessary in a film where the real laughs – and there are dozens of them – arise from the dark difficulties of human interaction and the frightening fact of human irrelevance.

The week’s other big comedy exists as if to emphasise the Coens’ pinpoint precision. The Informant! () – note the ominous exclamation mark – is a broad comedy about Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), an agribusiness whistleblower with delusions of sanity. Director Steven Soderbergh isn’t altogether with it either.

Whistleblower: Matt Damon in ‘The Informant!’

We look on in bewilderment as both make fools of themselves – Whitacre by trying to give the FBI the run-around, Soderbergh by hiring Marvin Hamlisch (The Sting) to compose an incongruous 1970s soundtrack and giving Damon a voiceover full of clipped, stand-up comedyish “perceptions” about the texture of avocados and that sort of thing. Scott Z. Burns’s script hinges entirely on incidents that take place off-screen. The film will only work if audiences fail to notice this. But they won’t, so it won’t.

Glorious 39 () is another addled exercise in secrecy and conspiracy, this time set in London and Norfolk in the late 1930s, and played as tragedy – or anyway, solemn melodrama – rather than farce.

Secrecy and conspiracy: ‘Glorious 39’

Sinister upper-class politicians are bumping off loud-mouthed anti-appeasement campaigners in an attempt to prevent war with Hitler – a costly enterprise that would destroy the beloved status quo. But they didn’t count on Bill Nighy’s adopted daughter (Romola Garai), who has no stake in upholding traditions. Stephen Poliakoff performs his usual routine of conjuring an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue for the first hour and failing to fulfil it in the second.

It is an unusual week in which new work by figures such as Soderbergh and Poliakoff is shamed by the latest teen soap opera, vampire flick or sequel – let alone a film that rolls all of these into one. New Moon () is the second instalment in Stephenie Meyer’s all-conquering Twilight saga and will sell more tickets than the week’s other 10 releases put together.

Besotted: Kristen Stewart in ‘New Moon’

It is a tranquil, even sleepy affair as these things go, with landscape and heartache taking priority over action and effects. Chris Weitz (American Pie) replaces Catherine Hardwicke as director. The setting is still Forks, Washington, a town whose inhabitants strike awkward poses and move in slow motion. The heroine is still the sweet, troubled teenager Bella Swan, played by the likeable and gifted Kristen Stewart. She is still besotted with the brooding, muttering 109-year-old vampire Edward Cullen, played by the wan and vapid Robert Pattinson, currently serving time as the Most Famous Actor in the World.

The Twilight saga is the American answer to Harry Potter. Pattinson appears in both. Otherwise it is a familiar case of British greyness and American spike. We get wizards, they get vampires. We get spectacles and Latin, they get cheekbones and love-bites. We get boarding school, they gets high school. We get scarves and Quidditch, they get bare torsos and motorcycle repair. New Moon suffers from a mild case of second-chapter syndrome; symptoms include the laborious establishing of conflicts, a general air of drift and pointlessness, and a cliffhanger ending. An unappealing formula, but oddly effective. I look forward to the next one.