A cult favourite back when our people were fair and had stars in their hair, this addled 1974 sensory epic follows legendary surfer and cameraman George Greenough’s search for the perfect wave. Set to the ping-pongs of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”, the final 20 minutes are surf-cinema’s equivalent of 2001’s Stargate sequence?but it’s for boardheads and Floyd completists only. Give us Point Break any day.

Christopher Nolan was never going to find it easy to follow a film as wholly individual as Memento and Insomnia initially seemed a somewhat disappointing foray into the conventional mainstream, slick, professional, but rather empty?much like Panic Room, David Fincher’s follow-up to the blistering genius of Fight Club.

Watching it again, however, Insomnia is a quiet revelation, a compelling meditation on guilt and obsession, the price driven men pay for what passes as their souls when certain lines are crossed. Al Pacino is, no surprise, tremendous as the veteran cop investigating the murder of a teenage girl in nightless Alaska even as his own career as a legendary investigator is under critical review. Robin Williams, meanwhile, is creepily effective as one of the suspects in the killing and his scenes with Pacino are grippingly intense. Nolan probably concedes too much to the multiplex?the final showdown is a hollow sop to the box office?but at its lingering best, Insomnia is insidiously brilliant.

DVD EXTRAS: None.

A polite, prissy take on Wilde which seems to think he wrote for children. Rupert Everett and Colin Firth are there, of course, as a playboy and a country mouse, both posing as “Earnest” while ducking scenery-munching from the tragically overrated Judi Dench and, in the token Gwyneth role, Reese Witherspoon. Muffs every joke as lamely as a fifth-form production.

Along with Insomnia and the inexplicably-unreleased Death To Smoochy, this eerie thriller serves to rehabilitate Robin Williams. His cloying wacky zaniness jettisoned, he’s a broody bugger as the middle-aged loser who becomes obsessed with a cute family whose holiday snaps he’s developed for years. Like a chubbier Travis Bickle, he feels his fantasy figures owe him emotional payback. He freaks, rivetingly.

Watching the ripples set in motion through the suburbs of Sidney by the murder of therapist Barbara Hershey, Ray Lawrence’s movie is the most unfashionably mature murder mystery of the past decade. There may be something too neat about how everything fits together, but it’s a film that understands life at its messiest. As the cop brooding at the centre, Anthony LaPaglia gives the performance of his career.

Two strands of British comedy collide with utterly predictable results (all together now: “Oooh, Matron!”) as the usual crew is augmented by the sublime Frankie Howerd and a positively quirky supporting cast (Anita Harris, Peter Jones, Julian Orchard). Post-irony, I think we should admit the Carry Ons are dreadful, but Sid James’ laugh remains an imported national treasure.

Nick Broomfield’s documentaries are as much farcical as investigative, with the director affecting the role of bumbling, plummy-voiced faux-naif, Kurt & Courtney (1998) was no exception. He looks hilariously out of place trailing around grungey Seattle, politely interrogating a series of eccentrics, conspiracy theorists and whacked-out dopers. He examines the possibility that Courtney murdered her husband, but witnesses prove so unreliable he drops the charge. However, the censorious, evasive Love still emerges as the Wicked Witch and, as always, Broomfield’s blundering approach masks a persistence which yields triumphant results. Most touching are tapes of a seven-year-old Kurt squealing along to The Monkees, innocence and exuberance still unspoiled.

The sequel to Robert Rodriguez’s maniacally good Spy Kids, with budding-Bonds Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara up against a rival team of adolescent agents and the monsters of mad scientist Steve Buscemi’s fantasy island. Suggesting a Ray Harryhausen movie invaded by the screwball surrealism of a Looney Tunes cartoon, it ups the first film’s formula of candy-coloured cool stuff for kids and in-jokes for grown-ups. Quite fantastic.

An assured if unspectacular directorial debut from Bill Paxton, Frailty turns Se7en on its head, splices in The Sixth Sense and casts a crazy-eyed Matthew McConaughey as an enigmatic witness to the mysterious “Hand of God” serial killings. The look is Southern Gothic, the performances solid, and the final reel twist wildly courageous.