Occasionally, a film makes such an impression that it's impossible to view it objectively. For a Liverpudlian who will have been in Oxford for 30 years next October, Terence Davies's Of Time and the City is such a film. Having looked forward to this hometown essay-cum-elegy seemingly as long as for Liverpool's next championship win, it was difficult to contain the disappointment on watching what felt like a betrayal of the city and its people. Only on the fourth viewing was it possible to concede that Davies was entitled to say what he likes about Merseyside – after all, that's what auteur visions are for – and to accept with envy the detachment of a London critical corps who could only see a masterwork of audiovisual acuity and integrity.

Of Time and the City is a highly personal blend of memoir and reproof that slips between eulogy and onslaught with a waspish wit that soothes and seethes its way through Davies's hushed narration. Juxtaposing idealised recollections of austere Christmases, day trips to New Brighton and divine visitations to the movies with jaundiced snipes at “Betty Windsor” and The Beatles, Davies delights in his own sentimentality and indignation, as he laments the failure of the world to live up to his youthful expectations.

But while these intimate reveries recall the brilliance of Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), the despondent diatribe on the decaying multicultural port that Davies left behind is regretably dismissive of the generations he seems unable or unwilling to understand and yet who were responsible for hauling Liverpool out of its socio-economic mire and into the hopeful present that Davies himself celebrates in the restrainedly rousing finale.

Everyone prioritises their own nostalgia. Yet it's easy to share Davies's fondness for Julian and Sandy's impish Polari on Round the Horne, the classless poetry of the football results and the excitement of live sporting events like wrestling. It's even possible to empathise with the embittered ruminations on his alienation from God and the place that once seemed like paradise. But his acerbic spurning of juvenile tastes and experiences that don't chime in with his own feels curmudgeonly and unjust. So, while this is a masterly piece of cinema that conveys both the cherished personal significance of a bygone age and the unresolved issues of a complexly contradictory man, it's less successful as a piece of either epochal or local history.

That said, Of Time and the City is destined for the top ten films of 2008. As, surely, is Agnès Jaoui's Let's Talk About the Rain. Touching on everything from families to fidelity, politics to prejudice, this is a delicious slice of dystopic domesticity that captures the delusions and disappointments of life while also celebrating the little joys that make it worthwhile.

Returning south to stand in an election, Jaoui's chic feminist consents to appearing in a documentary by serial loser Jean-Pierre Bacri and his ambitious sidekick Jamel Debbouze, while also settling her late mother's estate with sniffy sister, Pascale Aebillot. Nothing goes smoothly, yet the calamities on both the hustings and the film set are presented with an insouciance that makes them all the more amusing.

With their attention to place and psychology, gesture and speech, the comedies of Jaoui and Bacri are among the unadulterated pleasures of modern French cinema and this, quite simply, is a gem.

The ICA in London has clearly timed its release of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies to coincide with the new Bond movie. Infinitely superior to Get Smart, this 1950s espionage spoof splendidly deconstructs the myth of Jean Bruce's indestructible special agent, who has featured in 265 novels and seven movies since his first appearance in 1949 (four years before 007).

Jean Dujardin plays Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath with a knowing mix of vacuous suavity and imperialist condescension that makes his investigation into the murder of comrade Philippe Lefebvre all the more hilariously inept. But while director Michel Hazanavicius gets plenty of mileage out of Dujardin's dismissal of everything Arab, he also throws in some silly running gags, lampoons the conventions of the spy sub-genre, keeps the plot moving at a satisfying clip and establishes a great rapport between the hapless hero and his accomplished Egyptian assistant, Bérénice Bejo.

Finally this week, there's In Prison My Whole Life. On December 9, 1981, Mumia Abu-Jamal was arrested for killing Daniel Faulkner, the white Philadelphia cop who was assaulting his brother Billy Cook, and he remains on Death Row, despite the intercession of Amnesty International. The insecurity of a guilty verdict reached through a combination of police intimidation and institutionalised racism has already been established in John Edginton's 1997 documentary Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt? But it does no harm to examine the new evidence it is hoped will finally overturn this infamous miscarriage of justice.

Produced by the husband-and-wife team of Colin Firth and Livia Giuggioli, and including interviews with such high-profile supporters as Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Mos Def and Snoop Dog, this is well-meaning and competently made. But Marc Evans's use of activist William Francome (who was born on the day that Abu-Jamal was detained) as our guide through the legal and socio-political complexities feels more than a little contrived.