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Setting out to foil a rogue North Korean Colonel bent on invading his southern neighbour, James Bond is tortured and imprisoned before setting out on a convoluted road to revenge.

The first half of this testosterone-loaded entry in the long Bond catalogue is sprightly and at times even surprising stuff. Imprisoned, tortured and only reluctantly traded back by his bosses, it's a long time before the familiar sleek, debonair master-spy emerges from the wreckage. You can't help but wonder what Roger Moore would have made of it all.

Starting off muddied and rain-lashed in combat fatigues, Bond then takes a severe beating during the Madonna-fuelled title credits to emerge after 14 months of imprisonment battered, bedraggled and encased in Robbie Coltrane's Hagrid wig and whiskers. This whole bizarre sequence reaches a delicious climax when our hirsute hero, clad only in sodden pyjamas, walks into a posh Hong Kong hotel and - deadpan - asks for his ‘usual suite'.

Even by the time the plot starts to veer towards more familiar territory, Director Lee Tamahori manages to keep the inventiveness flowing for awhile. For the first time in his 40 year career Bond actually gets to have sex onscreen (okay its not Basic Instinct, but not bad for PG rated). The veteran agent also gets to do a bit of serious swashbuckling against his sneering nemesis Gustav Graves which is actually as good an action sequence as the series has mustered in its long history.

Brosnan clearly relishes pushing at the boundaries of Bond's patented characteristics of smooth invulnerability. The first hour of this film gives him loads of opportunities to display anger, frustration, pain and even hate. Just look at his work during the sabre duel with Toby Stephens - is this guy seriously pumped up or what! Bond is essentially an absurd superman, but there are times when Brosnan makes him close to credible.

With this film, you always get the feeling that the quality can't quite last, and the second half, while still perfectly enjoyable, gradually loses sight of its plot and characters to wander down the well-trodden path of outlandish action set-pieces for their own sake. High-tech hardware and expensive sets get blown to bits, designer cars and motor bikes screech and tumble and the series' first major use of CGI technology looks distinctly threadbare in comparison to other blockbusters of the day. As so often happens with Bond films, plotlines become murky and confusing and it gets difficult to know just who is doing what, to whom, and for what reason. Its all nicely done in the familiar manner, but just a bit of an anti-climax after the imagination shown before.

Brosnan apart, most of the cast get few opportunities to shine. Toby Stephens is something of a one-dimensional pantomime villain; Halle Berry, although supposedly a crack American agent, gets surprisingly little to do and spends most of her time being either captured or rescued. Newcomer Rosamund Pike is the exception; cool, enigmatic and deadly, she easily steals the film from Berry and is one to watch.

Although it doesn't quite sustain its own early excellence, Die another Day keeps up the high standard set by Brosnan's Bond films and, in terms of the series as a whole, is among its better adventures. With probably just one film left during his tenure in the role, we can only hope that Brosnan can sign off with a bona fide Bond classic under his belt. He has been tantalisingly close so far; his films being easily the best since the 1960s adventures, but just lacking that final little touch of magic. Here's hoping the team can raise the bar just a little further next time around. It might be worth abandoning the recent - and generally successful - policy of hiring a fresh director for every movie and giving Tamahore a chance to build on his work here.

In 2054 Washington, the cop in charge of a pilot programme using human precognitives to detect crime before it is committed is himself accused of an upcoming murder and goes on the run to prove his innocence.

Minority Report is a frustrating piece of future-noir; a classic example of a good film which could have been great but for the infuriating compromises of mainstream Hollywood.

So much about this film is excellent; the thoughtfully imaged future, taking modern concepts of computer technology, architecture, consumerism and urban living to believable representations of where they are likely to be in 50 years time. Social concepts of disfunctionality, drug abuse, abandonment and invasion of privacy are equally well observed, and done so with impressively little moral comment.

The photography is suitably grainy, harsh and washed out, the casting excellent and the premise, very much influenced by American detective fiction, agreeably stuffed with plot twists and memorable characters.

There are basically only two things wrong with Minority Report, but they are both serious misconceptions which damage the films integrity and originality. The first involves the action sequences, which jar from the otherwise sombre and realistic tone and put the characters straight into over-the-top superhero territory. Cruise leaps across skyscraper-climbing cars like Spiderman. With the aid of a jet-pack he goes flying across buildings, through ceilings and plummeting down alleyways like Superman. He emerges from frantic fist-fights on automobile production lines without a hair out of place like James Bond.

It doesn't need to be like this. Minority Report is an action thriller crying out for realism and suspense delivered by believable human characters with proper physical limitations, not the gratuitous pyrotechnics of comic books. Spielberg shows a loss of nerve here, like he wants to remind us that he can still compete with the Wachowski brothers in the OTT action-showman stakes and never mind how out of place it all looks with the rest of his film.

The second mistake is even more grave. Without giving too much away, there is a point about three-quarters of the way through the film when the plot comes to a shocking, downbeat, but entirely appropriate end. It completely makes sense in context of the plot and in terms of the film's, bleak dystopian viewpoint. Popcorn-munchers and action junkies might moan, while still finding it acceptable; finding it true. Instead the Hollywood bean-counters, the marketeers and worst of all Spielberg and Cruise themselves can't bring themselves to go along with it. Faced with the choice between an artistically correct conclusion or a cynical, audience-friendly, uplifting and utterly jarring curtain they pump for the latter. By this stage of their careers both of these Hollywood powerhouses should have the guts to go for what's right rather than what's blandly thought to be commercially acceptable; but neither, it would appear, have quite enough conviction. The dollar wins out in the short term while the film's reputation, which could have been gigantic, loses out almost immediately.

The difference between a great Hollywood movie and a merely good one is often simply a matter of courage and integrity in the script, in the cutting room or in the board room. Spielberg and Cruise had another Blade Runner right in the palm of their hands here, and let it slip.

Robert Altman's long, fragmented and very hit-or-miss career reaches another of his periodic highs with this clever and beautifully realised dissection of the English class system and skit on the classic Agatha Christie whonunnit.

Altman's preferences for kaleidoscopic social observation has sometimes failed in the past due to the weight of its own ambition: multi-plotted and multi-charactered snapshots of time and place held together by loose ties or a general thematic framework. Sometimes it pays off spectacularly (Nashville); sometimes it flatters to deceive (Short Cuts).

It works well here due to the necessary discipline of the single location and the greater opportunities for interaction among the characters this affords. Add to that an exemplary cast of (mostly) British character actors and a knowing script by Julian Fellowes that gives Altman's keenly observant camera plenty of time to make its own points.

Rightly, Altman is less concerned with the murder mystery, which is almost an aside, than with the opportunity given by a shooting party at a 1930s stately mansion to observe the English aristocracy and their servants in social interaction.

Never happier than when involved in a bit of human anthropology, Altman lightly dissects the complexities and hierarchies which go on both above and below stairs; in which many subtle and unsubtle rituals are played out among groups of people who clearly dislike each other but are forced through circumstance, need or employment to observe the fundamental social practices required.

1932 is also a time of intruding change into the nature of the old English ruling classes, slowly disintegrating in this between-wars period and, in this case, largely reliant on the wealth of one particularly reluctant patron to keep them in furs and flunkies. In on this act comes the (to them) faintly odious whiff of 20th century new money, represented by Hollywood and popular culture. These intruders are kept in their place, but the message is clear - change is coming, and coming fast.

The muted colours and autumnal setting continue this theme of a world in terminal decline and of a group of characters keenly conscious of place and tradition yet also wearied and exhausted by it. Only at the very end, when fundamental change has occurred and many characters are left to face up to very different destinies do we see a bit of sunshine creeping in, heralding the dawn of a new era.

The cast are all excellent, with special mention deserving of Maggie Smith's effortless scene stealing as a bitchy but broke old Countess; the ever reliable Jeremy Northam as matinee idol Ivor Novello, well aware of his place in the great scheme of things and young Kelly Macdonald in the pivotal role of Smith's harassed maid who's inquisitiveness rattles a whole load of family skeletons.