Glittering stars a long way from Tinseltown

World cinema is an ambitious enough subject and one scarcely to be adequately covered in 200-odd pages, or less. For comparison, The Oxford History of World Cinema (1996) runs to 824 double-column pages. Tacitly recognising as much, these books restrict their scope to rather less than the all-encompassing claim that is implied in their titles.

"World cinema" as a term is often taken to mean "anything but Hollywood" - rather in the way that, in the field of popular music, world music implies "nothing that stands a hope in hell of being in the Top 20".

Shohini Chaudhuri follows this approach in Contemporary World Cinema and limits herself to the northern hemisphere. Australian and sub-Saharan African films are beyond her remit, as is the current burgeoning of Latin American cinema.

Contemporary World Cinema is pitched at a fairly elementary level and would make a useful primer for first-year film studies students, serving to open their eyes to the wealth of foreign-language cinema beyond the predominantly Hollywood diet they are likely to have grown up on.

Chaudhuri makes no attempt at revisionist criticism, cantering rapidly and painlessly through the major film-making nations within her chosen territories and pausing only for slightly more detailed accounts of a dozen "landmark films", including Thomas Vinterberg's Festen , Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees , Deepa Mehta's Fire and Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love .

At times, Chaudhuri's approach verges on the simplistic, seeming to assume a readership uninformed not only about foreign-language films but about most other things as well. In her chapter on Scandinavian films, we are helpfully told that "the sparsely populated northernmost parts of Sweden, Norway and Finland are inside the Arctic Circle, where winters are long, dark and extremely cold". Nor is her historical information always wholly reliable: Afghanistan has never been a British "imperial possession", and Egypt was a British protectorate, not a colony. But her book is fluent and readable, and should encourage film students to explore further.

Traditions in World Cinema takes a more sophisticated and wide-ranging approach. And it is more idiosyncratic, too. By "traditions", Linda Badley and Barton Palmer tell us in their introduction, they mean "bodies of films whose commonalities (usually the result, at least in large part, of the particular conditions of their production) make them worthy of collective study". This conveniently baggy definition allows them to include chapters on - inter alia - German Expressionism, the French Nouvelle Vague, post-communist cinema in Eastern Europe, Israeli "persecution films", Japanese horror movies and, a touch unexpectedly, the "Global art of found footage cinema".

This eclectic strategy makes more sense if we realise that Traditions in World Cinema is less a collection in its own right than a sampler for the projected series of books that shares its name. Peter Hames, who contributes the chapter on the Czechoslovak New Wave, is the author of the sister volume Czech and Slovak Cinema ; Roy Armes's chapter, "Early cinematic traditions in Africa", offers a preview of his book on African cinema, and so forth. But this hardly invalidates the volume under review.

Even second and third-year film students may lack the time or inclination to plough through the whole series - as most likely will visual arts students, who have other fish to fry. A well-compiled digest along the present lines may have its uses.

In any case, this collection contains plenty of useful and informative material. In his chapter on Japanese horror movies, Jay McRoy locates the roots of the current crop of internationally successful flesh-creepers ( Ringu and its sequels, Dark Water , Audition and the like) in earlier genre pieces such as Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba and Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan .

These in turn, McRoy argues, link back to long-standing traditions in Japanese literature, where ghosts - often lank-haired and vengeful - frequently figure in Noh and Kabuki drama. Similarly, Stephen Teo traces the perennial wenyi (melodrama) genre in Chinese cinema back to its theatrical origins and notes its recent flowering in Hong Kong films such as In the Mood for Love .

Several chapters throw light on neglected corners of cinematic history. Thorold Dickinson's last film, the rarely shown Hill 24 Doesn't Answer , features in Nitzan Ben-Shaul's study of Israeli persecution films, while Armes celebrates the pioneering silent-era work of the Tunisian Samama Chikly, the first independent film-maker of French colonial Africa. Other contributors traverse relatively well-trodden ground - the Danish Dogme movement, the new Iranian cinema - and offer correspondingly fewer original apercus.

Both these books should fill a gap. Comprehensive single-volume studies on the subject are rare; the nearest in recent years has been World Cinema: Critical Approaches , edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (2000) - and that, despite its title, gives two thirds of its space to Europe and America.

Philip Kemp is a freelance writer and film historian who teaches film journalism at Leicester University.