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Tattoos. Attitude. Muscles. Cueball noggins. Action sports. Attitude. Guns that look like willies. Evil Russians. Tattoos. Biggest-grossing US movie in blah-blah-yadda-yadda. Indeed, if Dubya and Dick Cheney had made their very own post-9/11 patriotic propaganda movie for the teens they need as globalisation fodder, then this would be it. Xander Cage is XXX is Vin Diesel is an action sports hero who has a problem with authority. Augustus Gibbons is Jackson with a comedy scar, who is an agent for the National Security Agency who forces XXX to foil some Russian goths who plan to plunge the free world into anarchy. Argento is the Bond Girl. Like the old action franchise, it has gadgets and explosions and one-liners and sex with women who don't talk. But don't bust a gut because you'll miss the jaw-dropping action set pieces, where Diesel's head is superimposed on to things that look a bit like snow and sky in a series of death-defying, um, stunts.

Who the hell is Xander Cage? A valid question, particularly if you don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of stalled twenty-first-century action franchises. Back in 2002, ‘XXX’ saw skate-punk Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) recruited by shady CIA officer Gibbons (Samuel L Jackson) to be his top terrorist-fighting secret agent. But efforts to drum up a sequel went sideways when Diesel dropped out and Ice Cube stepped into 2005’s ‘XXX: State of the Union’ as Cage replacement Darius Stone (if nothing else, the series has a way with names). Now here we are, 15 years since the first movie, and a combination of major Chinese investment, Diesel’s evident enthusiasm and presumably some sort of under-the-radar popular demand has dragged Big Vin back into the fold. The stage is set for a doomed attempt to relight the old fire. Right? Actually, no. ‘XXX: The Return of Xander Cage’ may be dumb as a post. It may be trashy, pointless and riddled with plot holes. But if it doesn’t slap a big silly smile on your face, you may want to check your pulse. In the time-honoured tradition of retired beat-em-up legends, Cage is sunning himself in a tropical backwater when the call comes down from ice-queen Marke (Toni Collette on fierce form) that his old handler has been murdered by rogue terrorist Xiang (Donnie Yen). And before you can say ‘Wait, isn’t he a bit old now?’, Cage is back in action, recruiting a crack team that includes The Hound from ‘Game of Thrones’ and a kid who looks like a Chinese pop s

Both ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Gravity’ took us out of this world, but the reputation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic – now re-released – is safe. It’s not that ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ doesn’t look dated – it does, a bit – but it remains as intelligent and provocative as ever, bearing years of conceptual dreaming. Until today’s equivalent of novelist Arthur C Clarke commits a hefty chunk of time to envisioning the beginning of human civilisation, as well as the far future, there will be no new film to supplant it. Though it was showered with praise for its technical achievements, ‘2001’ lingers more potently in the mind as a tall, black riddle: where are the new bones, the new tools, that will take us higher? Douglas Rain’s clammy voice work as Hal 9000, the murderous machine, remains one of Kubrick’s snazziest pieces of direction.

A superbly chilling essay in the supernatural, adapted from Daphne du Maurier's short story about a couple, shattered by the death of their small daughter, who go to Venice to forget. There, amid the hostile silences of an off-season resort, they are approached by a blind woman with a message of warning from the dead child; and half- hoping, half-resisting, they are sucked into a terrifying vortex of time where disaster may be foretold but not forestalled. Conceived in Roeg's usual imagistic style and predicated upon a series of ominous associations (water, darkness, red, shattering glass), it's hypnotically brilliant as it works remorselessly toward a sense of dislocation in time; an undermining of all the senses, in fact, perfectly exemplified by Sutherland's marvellous Hitchcockian walk through a dark alley where a banging shutter, a hoarse cry, a light extinguished at a window, all recur as in a dream, escalating into terror the second time round because a hint of something seen, a mere shadow, may have been the dead child.

Is there a film clip more often shown than the title number of this most astoundingly popular musical? The rest of the movie is great too. It shouldn't be. There never was a masterpiece created from such a mishmash of elements: Arthur Freed's favourites among his own songs from back in the '20s and '30s, along with a new number, 'Make 'Em Laugh', which is a straight rip-off from Cole Porter's 'Be A Clown'; the barely blooded Debbie Reynolds pitched into the deep end with tyrannical perfectionist Kelly; choreography very nearly improvised because of pressures of time; and Kelly filming his greatest number with a heavy cold. Somehow it all comes together. The 'Broadway Melody' ballet is Kelly's least pretentious, Jean Hagen and Donald O'Connor are very funny, and the Comden/Green script is a loving-care job. If you've never seen it and don't, you're bonkers.

An everyday story of Mafia folk, incorporating a severed horse's head in the bed and a number of heartwarming family occasions, as well as pointers on how not to behave in your local trattoria (i.e. blasting the brains of your co-diners out all over their fettuccini). Mario Puzo's novel was brought to the screen in bravura style by Coppola, who was here trying out for the first time that piano/fortissimo style of crosscutting between religious ritual and bloody machine-gun massacre that was later to resurface in a watered-down version in The Cotton Club. See Brando with a mouthful of orange peel. Watch Pacino's cheek muscles twitch in incipiently psychotic fashion. Trace his rise from white sheep of the family to budding don and fully-fledged bad guy. Singalong to Nino Rota's irritatingly catchy theme tune. Its soap operatics should never have been presented separately from Part II.

Chantal Akerman's feature is one of the few 'feminist' movies that's as interesting aesthetically as politically. It covers three days in the life of a bourgeois widow who supports herself and her somewhat moronic son by taking in a 'gentleman caller' each afternoon. Much of the film simply chronicles her ritualised routine, but does it in an ultra-minimal, precise style that emphasises the artifice of the whole thing...and gradually the artifice (coupled with the fact that Delphine Seyrig plays the woman) shifts the plot into melodrama, so that the film becomes a bourgeois tragedy.

The Francis Bacon paintings that haunt the opening credits are the first hint that life might be both tortuous and beautiful in Bertolucci’s unforgettable portrait of grief and anonymous sex in 1970s Paris. The city looks to have been built uniquely for the occasion as Brando – then 48, with shoulder-length greying hair and still so striking – gives his best performance in years as Paul, an American mourning his wife’s suicide. He finds solace in the bed of Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a pliant young thing whom he follows into an empty apartment that becomes the stage for their odd and oddly erotic affair (butter, animal noises and ‘No names!’). Vittorio Storaro’s photography – all yellows and browns – takes its cue from Brando’s camel coat, and the film’s volatile emotional register springs from that staggering opening shot of Brando howling under a railway bridge as Schneider ambles past, carefree and beautiful. It’s Brando’s film: his monologues devastate.

We begin down a hole. It’s 1898 in the Southern Californian desert and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a lithe, daddy-long-legs of a man, a lone-gun silver prospector whose tools, as he scratches around in the dark, are a pickaxe, a rope, some dynamite and sheer will. The scene, like many in the film, is gruelling, elemental, horrific even. He falls, breaks his leg and gains a limp that will stay with him for the rest of this bold, epic film. We hop forward to 1902, and Plainview is digging again, only now he’s on the hunt for something else: oil. He strikes black and brandishes his filthy hands to his accomplices. The dirt under his nails is a badge of honour, and one never to be removed; he wears it years later, even when he’s moping around a mansion, his mind driven loopy by success and paranoia. Another hop and it’s 1911, and we reach the meat of the movie. A smarter Plainview, a fedora on his brow, is in the shadows of a meeting of folk in Little Boston, California on whose land he wants to dig. ‘I’m an oil man…’ he implores, the first noise we hear from his mouth, not a word wasted, barely a breath not invested in his success. His voice is simple but mellifluous, its stresses and dips unusual but alluring. It’s the first hint in this long, odd and stunning film that this character – this wicked creation, this symbol of a nation, this quiet monster – will lodge in your psyche long after the movie cuts dead on an ending that’s strange and sudden, irritating and ple

A gorgeous, pin-sharp remaster for poet-dramatist-artist-director Jean Cocteau’s giddy, sumptuous 1946 retelling of the Freudian fairytale about a helpless girl and a kindhearted monster. Slightly pompous preamble aside, this ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is pure joy, a self-conscious but never precious attempt to revisit childhood fantasies and half-remembered dreams. The Beast’s ornate, decaying castle – ringed with thorns and filled with grasping hands – is a place of terror, wonder and mourning, the perfect reflection of its tragic, noble occupant. The tug of love between the monster and the maiden is never overplayed, but neither does the film shackle this beast – he remains unpredictable and threatening throughout. ‘La Belle et la Bête’ has been accused of valueing style over substance, but place the film in historical context (alongside, say, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, both released the same year) and its true intent is revealed: in the wake of unimaginable horror, this kind of fantasy is still achievable, and perhaps more important than ever. Tom Huddleston