Cine-nostalgia is all the rage at the moment, thanks to Martin Scorsese Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist. The first is an adaptation of Brian Selznick's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret that sees a young boy in 1930s Paris realise that the old man who works in the toy kiosk at the station where his drunken uncle repairs clocks is none other than Georges Méliès, the motion picture pioneer whose magical fantasies he adores, while the second recreates the last days of silent Hollywood to show how the coming of sound impacts upon the romance between fading idol Jean Dujardin and rising star Bérénice Bejo. Ironically, both pictures make extensive use of modern technology to recreate the past, with Scorsese shooting in 3-D and Hazanavicius relying on post-production wizardry to convert images photographed in colour into lustrous black and white.

This latter technique was similarly employed to excellent effect by Federico Veiroj in another paean to the seventh art, A Useful Life, which also confines its action within the Academy Ratio format that was de rigueur before the introduction of widescreen in the early 1950s. Celebrating cinephilia, while also cautioning that there is more to life than flickering shadows, this is an absolute gem that is so subtly studded with allusions to earlier film styles, movements and genres that it will delight arthouse aficionados and amuse those who view movies as a sociable recreation rather than the centre of their existence.

Jorge Jellinek has worked at the Cinemateca Uruguaya in Montevideo for 25 years. However, as he shares out the titles in a forthcoming Icelandic season with boss Manuel Martinez, a telegram arrives threatening the venue with immediate closure unless its back rent is paid. Undaunted, Martinez shuffles off to the projection booth to provide a live microphone translation of the intertitles in Erich von Stroheim's much-savaged silent masterpiece, Greed (1924), while Jellinek records a message to be played at subsequent screenings to urge patrons to buy bonds that will keep the cinémathèque functioning.

Jellinek also hosts a rather lifeless show on Capital Radio discussing matters of cinema scholarship and promoting forthcoming presentations, such as a centenary tribute to the Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira. In the meantime, they have to make do with a guest appearance by Uruguayan director Gonzalo Delgado, who comes to introduce his latest feature and a student short to a meagre audience and promptly complains about the way it is being projected. It's not all gloom for Jellinek, however, as he spots law professor Paola Venditto in the foyer and spends the next couple of hours steeling himself to invite her for coffee.

Typically, she has papers to mark and hurries into the night, leaving Jellinek to walk back through the swing doors alone. A montage follows showing Martinez and Jellinek striving to rectify their financial crisis. But a meeting with arts charity executive Felipe Arocena sounds the death knell and there is a melancholic immutability about the `Fine' on the Cinemateca screen as the curtains close for the last time.

Having packed his few belongings into a bag, Jellinek walks out into the wider world he knows better from films than experience. He sheds a tear on the bus and almost has to follow the example of a fellow pedestrian to work out how to cross a busy road. But his confidence begins to grow after he calls Venditto at the university and learns she will be free after 9 o'clock. Unfortunately, however, she meant in the evening and Jellinek finds himself wandering the campus, enjoying the creaky silence of a library and the bustle of the corridors. Indeed, he becomes so relaxed that he plays along when student Victoria Novisk mistakes him for a substitute teacher and he recycles Mark Twain's views on lying before departing with a quiet smile of satisfaction.

This burgeoning sense of self-esteem is reinforced when Jellinek catches sight of himself in a fish pond in the quadrangle and he defies a caretaker by tossing in a couple of coins and making a wish. Indeed, he feels so assured after a relaxing hair wash and cut that he abandons the bag that symbolises his film buffish past and he even dances like a cross between Fred Astaire and Alfred Molina on the law department staircase before asking Venditto if she would like to go to the pictures.

Surely destined for delicious double bills with Pablo Giorgelli's Argentinian road movie Las Acacias, this masterclass in observation and understatement is short, sweet and close to perfection. Veiroj directs with a wry affection that allows him to poke gentle fun at the seriousness with which Jellinik and Martinez approach their duties, while also admiring their devotion to both the moving image and their second home. He also clearly hopes that everything works out for Jellinik and Venditto, although he can't resist referring to his anti-hero's first love, with neo-realist and nouvelle vague passages being complemented by nods to silent cinema, genres such as comedy, the musical and the Western and to individual film-makers like Jacques Tati, Lisandro Alonso and José Luis Guerin.

Considering they are respectively a film critic and the former head of the Cinemateca Uruguaya, Jellinek and Martinez are splendidly persuasive, with the latter delivering a drolly withering monologue on the difference between being a movie anorak and genuinely appreciating an artform and the former's hangdog expression changing imperceptibly in a series of documentary-like close-ups in the radio studio, the cramped print library, the cinema office and the hairdressing salon. Jellinek is at his best in the classroom, however, as he paraphrases Twain to extol the virtues of innocent deception and, thus, contradicts Jean-Luc Godard's oft-quoted contention by suggesting that cinema is actually lies 24 frames per second.

Unfortunately, for all its earnestness, the week's other homage is nowhere near as successful or succinct. Directed by Singaporean auteur Eric Khoo, Tatsumi reflects on the career of Japanese comic-book artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi and interweaves pivotal incidents from his life with five of his best-known stories. However, while creative animation director Phil Mitchell switches adroitly between monochrome vignettes and colourful, self-narrated extracts from the 75 year-old's autobiography A Drifting Life, the various segments fail to gel into a satisfying whole and only dedicated manga fans are likely to be engrossed.

Tatsumi starts his odyssey with a salutation to his artistic inspiration, Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and the father of the youth-targeted manga form that Tatsumi would abandon in 1957 when his comic Black Blizzard launched the gekiga style of graphic works for adults. However, it wasn't until the 1970s that Tatsumi became a household name and the featured quintet emanate from this period and reflect aspects of the social, economic and political changes that transformed Japan in the decades either side of the Second World War.

Born in Osaka in 1935, Tatsumi grew up in a country occupied by a foreign power and still shattered by both the humiliation of defeat and the horror of the atomic assault that forced the militarist regime to surrender in August 1945. Indeed, the first story, `Hell', captures the national mood in its depiction of how a young photographer named Koyanagi forged his reputation with a snap of the shadow formed on the wall of a decimated Hiroshima house seeming to show a devoted son giving his mother a massage at the moment of detonation. However, as Koyanagi finds himself at the forefront of a movement to prevent future conflagrations, he learns the truth about what was actually happening in the Yamada household at that fateful moment.

The postwar trauma placed a strain upon the marriage of Tatsumi's parents and money was often tight. But, much to the frustration of his sickly older brother Okimasa, he began winning artistic competitions and learned a harsh lesson when he returned from school one day to discover that his sibling had torn up his drawings. This sense of betrayal and not knowing how best to respond to a change in circumstances informed `Beloved Monkey', which centres on a factory worker named Yoshida who dislikes the bustle of everyday life and cherishes the isolation he shares with a simian who spends much of its time cowered resentfully in a corner of a cramped Tokyo bedsit. However, everything changes when Yoshida meets bar hostess Reiko at the monkey enclosure at the Ueno Zoo and an act of daydreaming carelessness at work not only costs him an arm, but also his only true friend.

Despite idolising Tezuka, Tatsumi failed to find a niche in his child-friendly brand of illustration and began producing darker tales aimed at a more discerning audience. However, this left him feeling as vulnerable as Japan in the decade after American forces finally withdrew and as isolated as Hanayama, the salaryman in `Just a Man' who is facing imminent retirement and the prospect of drifting towards death in the company of the detested wife and spoilt daughter who have both slept with the latter's ingratiating husband. Thus, he withdraws the savings he has kept secret and decides to blow them on satisfying his long-suppressed sexual urges. But a visit to a bathhouse proves as unsatisfactory as a date with an escort and it's only after seeing a monument fashioned from a giant gun at a shrine to the war dead that he vows to invest his cash in the seduction of his younger and recently jilted work colleague, Okawa.

The disappointing misogyny of this story recurs in the final pair, which serve to show how the boom years of the 1960s (which coincided with the growing popularity of the gekiga genre) could not entirely erase the guilt and shame of the misbegotten imperialist adventure under the Emperor Hirohito. A hint of this afflicts both Shimokawa - the cartoonist in `Occupied', who becomes obsessed with the pornographic graffiti in a downtown public toilet and is arrested while making his own contribution after being hired by a new publisher - and Mariko, the prostitute in `Good-Bye' who responds to being deceived by a GI named Joe in the immediate aftermath of defeat by sleeping with her own father so she can treat him as just another exploitative man and no longer feel duty-bound to subsidise his drinking.

The harshness of the storylines is striking and Khoo (himself a onetime comic-book artist) commendably conveys historical Tatsumi's significance in introducing a radical new realism to the comic aesthetic. But, while the deftly shaded images adhere closely to their sources (which have never been filmed before), they have been awkwardly animated - apparently through a mix of traditional cel and digital processes - and many will find them more than a little melodramatic, not to say sensationalist. Only `Hell' is genuinely compelling, although its twist ending establishes a trend that recurs in each of the ensuing episodes, which contain compositions by Khoo's 13 year-old son, Christopher. Consequently, one is left admiring the ambition and artistry of the project, while also wondering whether the biographical and portmanteau elements might not have benefited from being in separate pictures.

It's getting on for four years since the Wall Street bubble burst and placed the entire planet in severe financial jeopardy. When the market crashed in 1929, Hollywood was in the middle of launching talking pictures and didn't want to scare audiences away by forcing them to confront the terrifying realities breaking around them. Thus, the studios continued to churn out musicalised escapism until 1932 when Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road exposed the bitter truth of a nation in the grips of the Great Depression.

Some eight decades later, the 3-D revolution similarly convinced the Hollywood suits to keep peddling mindless entertainment rather than seek to explain to the average punter why fiscal community recklessness had robbed them of their futures. But producers finally began to focus on corporate greed, cynicism and hypocrisy, as Jason Reitman's Up in the Air (2009) was followed by John Wells's The Company Men and Oliver Stone's long-awaited, but crassly disappointing Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (both 2010). However, this trio has been eclipsed by JC Chandor's hugely impressive debut, Margin Call, which clearly owes much to David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and the fact that the writer-director's father spent 40 years with the wealth management concern, Merrill Lynch.

On the day he is laid off during a cull of four-fifths of the workforce, risk analyst Stanley Tucci tosses underling Zachary Quinto a disc containing his rough calculations of what might happen if the company's heavily leveraged, mortgage-backed securities fall in value by over 25%. Running the projections through some standard business models, Quinto realises that the prospective losses would far exceed its total market capitalisation and calls buddy Penn Badgley and newly promoted boss Paul Bettany back from a swanky Manhattan bar to check the ticking time-bomb Tucci has unearthed.

The cavalier Bettany is quick to recognise the implications and summons chief trader Kevin Spacey back from the vet's surgery where his beloved dog is dying of cancer to take a look at the numbers. A salesman promoted out of his comfort zone, Spacey is left with little option but to break the news to his superiors, chief risk officer Demi Moore and senior executive Simon Baker, who convene an emergency meeting for Quinto to present his findings to accountant Aasif Mandvi. His verdict is damning and Baker has no alternative but to inform CEO Jeremy Irons of the impending calamity.

Before Bettany and Quinto are dispatched to find Tucci in the hope he will be willing to return and help the firm reach calmer waters, Irons vows to go on the offensive and orders Spacey to have his team sell the toxic stock at discounted prices as soon as trading starts in a bid to shift as much as possible of the `greatest pile of odiferous excrement in the history of capitalism' before their competitors realise something ruinous is happening. Dismissing Spacey's concern that no one will ever buy anything from them again, Irons coolly laments that no one ever learns financial lessons and reels off the dates of previous meltdowns that were deemed irretrievably disastrous in their day before tucking into his breakfast and filling in another clue in his crossword.

Having extended his sympathies to Moore, who has agreed to play the scapegoat (even though she warned against over-extending in sub-primes and was ignored largely because she was a woman in a man's game), Spacey delivers a half-hearted pep talk in which his moral revulsion is just about kept below the surface by his corporate commitment. By contrast, Bettany is galvanised by the chance to profit from the misfortunes of others, including Badgley, whose lifelong ambition left in tatters as Quinto is richly rewarded for his fast-thinking and loyalty.

Anyone nauseated by the arrogance and avarice of the city types who keep claiming their bonuses while the country suffers the consequences of their complacency and incompetence will be gripped by this intense and intelligent drama. Chandor occasionally resorts to having high-ranking characters ask for complex financial information to be spelt out in plain English, but such concessions to accessibility chillingly reinforce the impression that those calling the shots in boardrooms across the globe have no better grasp of the business they are handling than the average movie-goer. He also relies on a few too many lingering panoromas of the nocturnal New York skyline. But, otherwise, this is a confident and accomplished bow that benefits greatly from Frank G. DeMarco's eerie images of the computer screens pocking John Paino's lugubriously chic interiors and the relentless drone of Nathan Larson's synthesised score.

The performances are also laudable, with Quinto wide-eyedly torn between doing the right thing and protecting his own position, Tucci playing the good banker with a quiet modesty that contrasts with the sinister suavity of Baker's Teflon assassin and Irons dashing off callous bon mots with a steely patrician certitude. But it's Spacey's struggle between conscience and allegiance that most intrigues and the final shot of him burying his dog in the front lawn of the mansion he evidently lost to ex-wife Mary McDonnell in a divorce settlement provides a sobering reminder of the price to be paid for selling one's soul.