An explosion in the brain. A reek of cordite. A reeling of the senses. Isn’t there something ballistic about great art? Isn’t it a little frightening – at best – as it comes out of the barrel? Couscous is a prizewinning new movie from a French-Tunisian director. Killer of Sheep is a 30-year-old, rarely seen, classic, restored and reissued, from a black American director. Both hit one straight between the eyes, and after the first shock speed towards the heart via the brain.

Abdellatif Kechiche made a wonderful little-seen film called L’Esquive (Games of Love and Chance) – a Rohmer-style comedy acted by immigrants and pieds blancs – and specialises in raising everyday reality to a poetic pitch. Couscous won the runner-up Special Jury Prize at Venice last year, under the French name La Graine et Le Mulet (The Grain and the Mullet). That title surely hints at the loaves and fishes miracle, allowing for a Koran-raised artist’s scriptural crossover. A Muslim father threatened with job loss in the French fishing town of Sète tries to save his family – and work his own miracle – by opening a floating restaurant.

His ex-wife agrees to cook the couscous for the first-night banquet; his live-in mistress agonises over whether to attend; the mistress’s daughter, hotheaded and beautiful (and spellbindingly played by Hafsia Herzi, pictured left), tries to salvage incipient disaster; and the man’s children and children-in-law are a warring bunch who must somehow be brought into harmony with the local bigwigs invited to the feast.

The film’s first half is a character-building prelude, long but brilliant. The unfaithful cock-of-the-walk son married to the daughter-in-law incensed with jealous grief; the ex-wife who artfully uses her cooking skills as a family adhesive; the old man himself, played with the stoical incandescence of a De Sica hero, a tragic figure finally falling on the pyre of his own defiance. The film’s heart-rending climax becomes nearly unbearable.

Couscous feels organic in the best sense. Everything grows from the same root and to the same deep human rhythm. We seem to live in the bloodstream of this family, sharing the beat of their pride, obduracy and emotionalism, of their dreams, above all of their conflicted desire to be faithful to themselves and their culture while also raising the flag of convenience known as being “French”.

Killer of Sheep is another family tale and another magic artistic bullet. This one flies in slow motion, seeming to whirl its scenes outwards as it goes. Made in 1977 by a UCLA graduate student, the movie has embedded itself in legend, a regular in top tens of independent American cinema.

The tableaux of a black family in Watts, Los Angeles, are often non-speaking, but backed by haunting music (Rachmaninov, Gershwin, Earth Wind and Fire). There is the abattoir-working dad (Henry G. Sanders), with his placidly fatigued face stirred by invisible thoughts; the anxious, beautiful mother (Kaycee Moore); the kids with their limber lives, hinting at souls as gymnastic as their bodies. They jump rooftops, lie for “dares” on railtracks, stand on heads on door-stoops. Meanwhile, the dad’s pals spend hours nursing a new engine into a beaten-up car, although we know that everything will end up where it started.

It isn’t a polemical film. Even the slaughterhouse scenes do not ask to be read as a parable of class or race oppression, though the symbolic kinship between sacrificial sheep and the Passion may have been in the mind of a young filmmaker aged 33. Ultimately, this is film as poetry. The images tell the story, speak its hidden rhymes, sound its deeper truths.

And so to tosh. The Edge of Love is less a bullet from a gun, more a custard pie from a team of lacklustre British clowns. You and I know that if we had a relative who wittered on about a grandmother’s supposed carnal liaison with Dylan Thomas – as co-producer Rebekah Gilbertson apparently did when pressing her family history on director John Maybury, screenwriter Sharman McDonald and McDonald’s daughter Keira Knightley (starring as the wartime torch-singer hot for the Welsh bard) – we would go “Ho hum”. We might listen if convinced it was a true story. Failing that, we would at least hope it was a good story.

Instead Knightley and Sienna Miller, as wife Caitlin Thomas, drift through two hours of catatonic troilism. Matthew Rhys, handsome and miscast, nearly herniates his chin trying to look as plump, boozy and dewlapped as the real Dylan. Irish actor Cillian Murphy does officer-English as Knightley’s off-to-the-front husband, as the bombs of the second world war provide an answering percussion to three beating hearts.

Of beating minds there is no sign. Rhys tosses off scraps of verse as if auditioning to do Richard Burton on Dead Ringers. Miller wastes away from script malnutrition. Knightley’s finest, if absurdest, hour is crooning in cabaret style on a Blitz-era London tube platform. With a little more effort, this film might have attained the status of kitsch.

Adulthood, written, directed by and starring Noel Clarke, is no better. All that made Clarke’s Kidulthood fresh – sparky street wisdom, focused vignettes of gang, class and race war – has gone awol. The sequel stutters from one dim dialogue or action scene to the next as Clarke’s prison-released hero reintegrates, or tries, with the walking cliches of the West London “hoods”. Filmmaking with a mission has flatlined into filmmaking with a message. Brotherhood is all: I think we knew that already.

For 10 minutes The Escapist, a jail tale, threatens to make it three British duds in a row. Isn’t this the same old porridge? Assemble the usual Equity suspects (Brian Cox, Liam Cunningham, Damian Lewis, Joseph Fiennes); stir in the slamming doors, sudden knivings, simmering tensions; then top off with a daft escape plan.

What do you know? It works a treat. A spruce and challenging story structure turns expectation topsy-turvy. Characters grow and develop while we are not looking. Wit flourishes in the cracks. (”You’ve got one thing going for you, Frank,” a lag tells Cox. “You’re too old to die young”).Early release, please, from Poverty Row filmmaking for director/co-writer Rupert Wyatt.

The Ruins is another surprise: tripe, but it turns out to be tripe that knows its onions. Sizzling scenes of danger, delirium and DIY surgery enliven the tall story of backpacking youngsters trapped atop a Mexican step-temple. At times it is too funny to be scary, at others too scary to be funny. At others still – movie-buff bliss – it is a faultless fusing of the sublime and ridiculous.