Baraka/Chronos

As film pitches go, Ron Fricke's explanation of this stunning non-verbal film in the "making-of" extra - "it's an idea based on humanity's relationship with the eternal" - wouldn't make production heads bust out the chequebook, but the director got his film made in 1992, and this meditation on the state of the world speeds along as effortlessly as his time lapse photography.

The film works from juxtaposition by turns shocking, bizarre and gorgeous: so a room of skulls bounces up against the terracotta army; a felled tree contrasts with battery farming; burning oil wells blend with bouncing African tribal rituals; a monkey in a hot spring is followed by an astonishing sequence of massed arm-waving from somewhere Oriental.

Fricke, the cinematographer for the similar-themed Koyaanisquatsi, doesn't tell you where you are: some scenes are site-specific, others could be anywhere, and that's part of the director's point that we are all interconnected. If this makes it sound a but hippy-dippy or exploitative, it's not how it plays: it's more like commentary-free footage from The Blue Planet, made years later, than the deeply suspect Mondo Cane compilations of the 1960s.

Composer Michael Stearns does a wonderful job of mix-and-matching the music to fit, at one point mashing up Kodo drums and bagpipes, though a directorial commentary would have been a good idea to help us sort out a complex 13-month, 24-country saga. Fricke's directorial debut, Chronos, a trial run made for Imax cinemas with a lot of footage of statues, castles, gargoyles and cliffs is included in this double-release.