Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's an intelligent action movie

X-Men (12) <i>Bryan Singer, 104 mins</i> | Me Myself I (15) <i>Pip Karmel, 104 mins</i> | The Jolly Boys' Last Stand (nc) <i>Christopher Payne, 88 mins</i> | Ring (nc) <i>Hideo Nakata, 95 mins</i> | Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (15) <i>Patrice Ch&Atilde;&copy;reau, 95 mins</i> | Himalaya (PG) <i>Eric Valli, 108 mins</i>

Although Bryan Singer's X-Men is the only one of this summer's big studio releases to be based on a comic book, it's just about the only one that doesn't actually look like a walking, talking comic. Hollywood logic dictates that movies during the summer take their cue from roller-coasters, jettisoning excess baggage like narrative and characterisation in favour of super-charged spectacle. That's why the likes of Mission: Impossible 2, Gone in 60 Seconds and The Perfect Storm don't stand up well to scrutiny. They exist to be experienced not analysed. X-Men, on the other hand, is that rarity, an intelligent, moral action movie.

Although Bryan Singer's X-Men is the only one of this summer's big studio releases to be based on a comic book, it's just about the only one that doesn't actually look like a walking, talking comic. Hollywood logic dictates that movies during the summer take their cue from roller-coasters, jettisoning excess baggage like narrative and characterisation in favour of super-charged spectacle. That's why the likes of Mission: Impossible 2, Gone in 60 Seconds and The Perfect Storm don't stand up well to scrutiny. They exist to be experienced not analysed. X-Men, on the other hand, is that rarity, an intelligent, moral action movie.

In the near future, mutants have evolved into Homo superior, the next step up the genetic ladder, and are hated and feared by ordinary humans. Led by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), the X-Men are a team of super-powered mutants sworn to protect a world that shuns them. Xavier's nemesis Magneto, (Ian McKellen) whose control over magnetic waves allows him to bend steel and stop bullets in mid-air, is convinced that humans and mutants can never co-exist. The latter, he believes, are the rightful heirs to Homo sapiens and he's ready to start the war that will establish that new order. Xavier and Magneto are old friends turned rivals and it's their ideological battle (with its echoes of Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X) that's the fulcrum of Singer's movie.

There's nothing here to match the visual ambition of Blade Runner or the sustained inventiveness of The Matrix. But Singer's restraint means he's managed to avoid the pitfalls which befell the over-designed and increasingly farce-like Batman movies. He has wrought a very human film rather than a costume drama. A sly humour and surprising degree of frailty on the part of the heroes, especially Hugh Jackman's feral loner Wolverine and Anna Paquin's haunted Rogue, offset the inherent absurdity of men in tights.

If many of the rest of this week's films are to be believed, the real struggle taking place today is the age-old battle of the sexes. In Me Myself I, Pamela Drury (Rachel Griffiths) is a successful, single journalist convinced that life is empty without Mr Right. On the brink of despair, she accidentally collides with and then takes the place of a parallel version of herself, who has chosen marriage and kids over career. This Australian production has been compared to 1997's Sliding Doors, but it's really Bridget Jones Goes To Suburbia. Yet director Pip Karmel hasn't shed much new light on the singleton "dilemma". Pamela is miserable when she's single and miserable when she's married. And when wedded life to Mr Right, high school sweetheart Robert (David Roberts) proves to be a sad disappointment, she just finds another, apparently perfect man to moon after. Doesn't she ever learn? And doesn't Karmel care that, instead of parodying the you-can-have-it-all school of glossy-magazine feminism, she's created a film with the mores of a Doris Day movie?

What, I wonder, would Pamela make of Spider (Andy Serkis), who's also had enough of the single life? Marriage for Spider means resigning from the Jolly Boys, his gang of laddish friends whose idea of fun is slapping a passer-by round the face with a fish. That and lots of drinking. The mini-budget The Jolly Boys' Last Stand is shot entirely on video. Christopher Payne has put the medium to good use, employing it's verité aesthetic to get closer to his characters, until what starts as a cheery homage to laddism becomes an unexpectedly acute critique of its shortcomings.

That's more than can be said for Robert Jan Westdijk's Siberia, which never stops to question the misogynistic premise it's based on. Best friends Hugo (Hugo Metsers) and Goof (Roeland Fernhout) have a scam that involves picking up female back-packers newly arrived in Amsterdam, sleeping with them, stealing their money, and ripping a page out of their passports as a momento. But when they meet the smart, cynical Lara (Vlatka Simac), who systematically manipulates them both, it would seem they've met their match. However, like one of those Japanese soldiers marooned on a tropical island, Westdijk is still fighting the sex wars long after the rest of us have gone home. His women are either victims, or in the case of Lara, castrating predators. And it's painfully clear he thinks the hunting should be left to men.

Hideo Nakata's Ring is being described as the Japanese Blair Witch Project. It owes more, though, to David Cronenberg's fascination with technology as a locus for terror. A strange video is rumoured to be circulating amongst a group of school kids. "Watch it", goes the warning, "and unless you show it to someone else within the week, you die". When children do start to die, Reiko (Nanako Matsushima), a journalist, tries to discover the truth about the mysterious video. Ring has broken box-office records in Japan, less for its ability to frighten, one supposes, and more because Nakata has created a plausibly unsettling urban myth that resonates beyond the confines of the cinema.

In Patrice Chéreau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, the truth about minor painter Jean-Baptiste Emmerich is gradually revealed, as his friends and former lovers take the train from Paris to his funeral in the countryside. Each of them jockeys for position as the real confidant of the late Jean-Baptiste, forging alliances and rivalries that keep switching through this complex and often confusing ensemble piece.

It would be easy for the human drama in Himalaya to be dwarfed by the vastness of the mountain range that Eric Valli sets his movie against. For much of the time, though, he lingers on the faces of his actors, so that the scenery around them becomes a supporting character in this intensely beautiful film. Based on a true story and using a Tibetan cast, it follows a small mountain community's attempt to lead their herd across the peaks before winter, all the time wrestling with issues of love, honour and pride. These themes prevent the film from becoming an extended ad for National Geographic but, ironically, suggest that it could have been filmed anywhere.

Antonia Quirke is away