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The rapt watchfulness of this film is almost intolerable.

The minutiae of the woodwork instructor protagonist's drab and solitary daily existence merely repel us at first: his opaque, inexpressive, sulky-looking face (on the rare occasions that we see it, as opposed to the back of his neck) seems to confirm that there is nothing here for us, nothing but the muffled dullness of a dead-end existence, nothing but the droning of power tools in the sullen workshop and the heating-up of tinned soup in the bare little apartment.

Then the film's remorseless attention to the mundane starts to hint at some turmoil of this man's inner life, which is being kept rigorously in check by everyday rituals: the conscientious painful sit-ups, the critical measurement of the trainees' clumsy work. Something unbearable is being borne. Some terrible price is being paid. Olivier is like some powerful caged mammal, ever darting just ahead the camera's reach. We fear for the boys in his domininion -- especially for the new trainee, whom he stalks with a feral intensity.

And now we learn the awful sadness of what ails Olivier, and what has brought everything to a head. Now the camera watches his every move with mixed dread and wonder. Now every little thing he does matters, as we struggle to gauge what he will do next. Now the details of just what nail to use, of the trick to carrying a heavy wooden lintel (so like a cross), become utterly compelling -- not as displacement activities, but as things that can be relied upon, as tangible truths.

And finally, on long drive to a timber yard one late-autumn weekend, we watch a miracle unfold: halting, clumsy, almost wordless, although there is a sort of confession, and a sort of catechism. Wet leaves still stick to the boy's back from a momentary struggle in a wood as the newly-cut planks are stacked, silently, in the trailer. Master and apprentice are joined by the mystery of their craft. A father without a son has found a son without a father.

And now, at last, we understand that the film's watchfulness has been Olivier's own: his need to observe, to assess, to measure up (something for which he has a peculiar knack), in order to decide how the right thing is to be done. For only then is it done decisively, deftly and truly.

That a film of such simplicity, unflinching honesty and moral intensity can be made today is itself little short of miraculous. In both its symbolic language and its belief in the possibility of grace, it is firmly rooted in a particular north-European pietistic (and specifically Catholic) tradition. But never mind about that. This is a genuine and beautifully modest masterpiece of humane realism.

A quarter of a century on, this remains Spielberg's most perfectly accomplished film, at once poetic and fiercely efficient, without a trace of the mawkishness, and latterly preachiness, that has marred much of what he has done since. The disastrous watershed of `Star Wars' and the dumbed-down 80s lay ahead. `Jaws' marks the final flowering of the mass-market Hollywood genre movie as high art.

Like the best of the Westerns, this film resonates with the myths of the Old World. It is Homeric in form: the internecine squabbling on land in the film's first half is the `Iliad'; the testing of Brody at sea in the second part, the `Odyssey'. (`Show me the way to go home', he sings in his cups.) The great shark is the monster threatening the community that, like Theseus or Oedipus, Brody must sally forth to slay, testing and discovering himself in the process. There is something of Athenian tragedy, too, in the veiled and grieving mother who curses Brody at the dockside. Every hometown in America had its Mrs Kintner during Vietnam, and the guilt of that war – barely past when `Jaws' was made – is surely the film's deeply coded subject-matter.

`Amity, as you know, means friendship', intones the corrupt mayor, a small-town Nixon with a taste for horrendous polyester sports-jackets; yet its good burghers collude in the sacrifice of their children for the sake of a quiet life and an honest buck, and – as in Ibsen's `Enemy of the People' – disown the decent citizen who tries to blow the whistle. In a sense, Amity/America has conjured the predator into being. Quint's grisly yarn (scripted, it is said, by an uncredited John Milius) of the wreck of the USS `Indianapolis' – the film has a kind of out-of-body experience at this point – implies that this is Nature's revenge for the sin of Hiroshima (`Anyway, we delivered the Bomb'); as if the shark, cheated of full atonement in 1945, had followed this ancient mariner home, claiming him as a final (superbly gruesome) canape before sinking forever into the deep.

The film is framed by the clanging of a bell upon the waters, first in the stillness of night, finally in the light of day. Rarely has the space immediately in front of the lens been so effectively used to create a sense of depth and subjectivity – often, a face in extreme close-up filling one edge of the Panavision frame, almost breaking forward from the plane of the screen. We watch the boat set sail, ominously framed by a shark's bleached jawbone in the window of Quint's boathouse; the camera glides forward, through the jagged O, after the departing vessel, as if reaching out to call it back; the next shot, eerily and perfectly picking up the flow of that movement, is a direct reverse – we look back from the boat, over Brody's shoulder and following his gaze, at same window, receding in the distance (our last sight of land until the credits roll), the jawbone just discernible as a tiny ghostly shape behind the pane. Far out at sea, Quint's haunting tale told, the shark attacks in the darkness before dawn; Brody scrambles onto deck, fumbling to load his revolver, his face lurching towards the camera, then turning aside in a moment of stillness while, in the sky behind, we glimpse, for a fraction of a second, the low diagonal streak of a chance meteor, a foreboding of disaster and a sign of grace.

This is film-making of the very first order, effortlessly transcending its commerciality and genre, luminous with pity, fear and wonder. `Jaws' has featured in every `ten best' list this viewer has ever scribbled on a tablecloth. Time has not wearied it. See it again soon.

British thirty-plus-somethings will remember a long-running series of TV ads for the 1970s' closest approximation to wholemeal bread. One beheld, to the accompaniment of Dvorak's New World symphony wheezed out by a colliery band, a long-lost Northern working-class Eden -- cobbled streets shiny with recent rain, smudge-nosed, tousle-haired urchins in oversized flat caps, that kind of thing. All bathed in a rich golden glow, the still air scintillating with motes of dust (or possibly flour). Imagine "Brassed Off" shot by the cinematographer of "Elvira Madigan" and you get the picture.

It seems unlikely that the makers of "Nic" ("Nothing") had that oeuvre at the forefront of their minds when they made this film, if only because its risibility might have stayed their hands with the Golden Syrup. Alas, the sticky stuff is ladled on by the enamel bucketload. Every face is haloed in golden backlit hair; every speck of dust floats in one shaft of sunlight or another; and, yes, every cobble glistens.

We find ourselves in some (inexplicably -- unless perhaps for budgetary reasons -- depopulated) generic mid-European urban landscape, at some unascertainable date between the 1890s and the 1990s, where everything not coated in peeling stucco or chipped enamel is, basically, made of bakelite. The atmosphere is not so much dreamy as catatonic. There is an awful lot of extreme close-up (generally in profile, so that whispy strands of blond hair may catch the light to best advantage) and a certain amount of artfully composed long-shot (De Chirico meets Cartier-Bresson), but not a lot in between. The result is that nothing is ever placed -- visually, narratively or morally -- in any coherent context. Perhaps the intention was to convey, subjectively, the wretched (although inappropriately gorgeous) heroine's sense of oppression; but the result is simply oppressive.

The sad thing about this sad film, clearly made with the best of intentions, is that it is, says the director, based on a true story, recently reported in the Polish press, of just such a young woman, desperately concealing her advancing pregnancy from her brutish husband, doing away with the infant and standing trial for murder. Of course, that is in one sense a timeless story -- it has been replayed in every society through the ages. The fatal mistake here is to have decided that "timelessness" is the point, and to try to convey that literally; instead of focussing on the specific, and locating a heartbreaking tale in the real world of lived experience. So we drift in Never-Never Land -- which might do for fables or dreary old Magic Realism, but hardly cuts the mustard when it comes to the real pain of real human beings. In the end, we are neither drawn in to empathise (a la Ken Loach) nor challenged, by deliberate alienation, to make up our own minds (a la Bresson). Though, doubtless, the last thing the director intended, the film shrugs its shoulders fatalistically and settles for maudlin -- and ultimately callous -- platitudes about The Human Condition, instead of asking hard questions about how such things come to happen, in a time and a place, and how it feels to be caught up in them. What we have here, to be blunt, is the Hallmark Cards school of film-making, depressingly tricked out as "art" cinema.

Seemingly anxious to leave behind the grimy, grainy world of the Communist era, and to come out from under the shadow of giants like Kieslowski (whom one imagines telling just such a tale with unflinching and shattering directness), the makers of "Nic" have ended up, sad to say, throwing out the Realist baby with the Socialist bathwater. Ironically, the result, with its portentous calendar artiness, is unsettlingly reminiscent of upmarket totalitarian kitsch. These days, that won't even shift bread.