Suddenly all is not what it was. Birds shriek and fly up. Tree branches clatter, animated by an unseen force. The ground booms and quivers like a struck drum-skin. Then they all run screaming - all those Christmas movies without a thread of talent or durability between them - as King Kong steps into the arena, bangs his chest and yodels his victory cry.

Yes, they can all go packing. All the Potters, penguins and Narnias. They must run into the jungle, now that Peter Jackson's remake of the 1933 monster classic has arrived, a sovereign, tyrant and exemplar. Three hours of stupendous cinematic self-assurance, fantasy-adventure images to die for, by and with and a script and characters so much cleverer than Christmas entertainment should be that Jackson risks being clapped in chains and exhibited at the next World Fair. It would be his punishment for presumptive genius, our showpiece as a paradigm of what picturemaking talent looks like in the raw.

Film critics, far from being the coldblooded commentators of renown, are essayists with ravishment fantasies. We want tremendousness, outrage and damned cheek. (And yes, we get that as much from Buñuel, Fellini, Godard and Almodóvar as from good monster hokum.) Jackson was a promising imagist back in the days of Bad Taste and Braindead. He became agenius-on-the-cusp with The Lord of the Rings. Now King Kong proves that no one on the planet can touch him as a circus-master of the fantastic.

It isn't just a question of "How good are the beasts and monsters?" The answer is: terrific. They make Jurassic Park's bestiary look like cornflakes cut-outs. They rampage across the screen and virtually out from it. (The filmgoer's catalysed imagination creates its own 3D.) Brontosauri, T. rexes, giant bats and unclassified "things" - including a super-worm designed to enrich Freudian totemology with the concept of a phallus dentatus - crowd up a Skull Island dream-painted by Jackson and his designers. This island contains not a single location shot. Its beauty, realistic yet rhapsodic, will have Henri Rousseau and Gustave Doré gazing in wonderment from artists' heaven.

Even the nightmare moments have their lyricism. From where did Jackson pluck the image of the heroine's abduction by a midnight pole-vaulter, who resembles one of Goya's spooky stilt-walkers mixed into a nightscape by Fuseli? Then there is the wooden edifice - part tower, part drawbridge across a chasm - on which Naomi Watts's sacrificial heroine (venturing the first volley in an inventive repertory of screams) is lowered towards the jungle, like a human muffin on a toasting-fork.

Then there is Kong: not so much an animated hearthrug, more a silverback gorilla the size of Bloomingdales. Everything works here: the fur, the eyes, the - well, the humanity. This digi-Kong, whose motions and grimaces were modelled for Jackson by Andy Serkis (who performed Gollum's movements in Lord of the Rings), runs the spectrum from anger to sadness, from lechery to love, from doting to playing hard-to-get. His "not talking to you" look when the captive Watts realises, late in a dinosaur-ridden day, that Kong is her last, best hope, is a thing of beauty all its own.

The poor girl has already tried busking her way into his favour. But you cannot juggle and handstand for ever on a South Seas precipice. And the vaudeville actress never asked for this assignment, although appeasing an ape is fair nemesis for the hubris of accepting a location-acting job with a sleazeball mini-mogul (Jack Black: "You can trust me, I'm a movie producer"), as she does in the 40-minute pre-story set in Depression New York, where we also meet screenwriter Adrien Brody. Watts and Black are the knockabout. Watts and Brody are the romance (but these shipboard things never last). Watts and Kong are the real thing.

The Empire State Building scene is, in every possible sense, the climax. The erotomaniac implications of the sky-reaching spire were never clearer, even in King Kong I. Nor were its physical realities more vertiginous. At the preview, as we steeplejacked storey by storey towards final heartbreak, I wondered why my press-show brochure was damp. The answer: my palms were sweating. The scene is a Pelion triumph crowning an Ossa wonderwork. Poor Kong looks more tragic and love-transfigured, as he clings to hope's last precipice, than even Leonardo DiCaprio did, fingernail-bound to the flotsam in Titanic. Peter Jackson's film observes all the right fidelities, even to the original's last line. It was: "Beauty killed the beast"? Yes indeed. And it is beauty, as well as ingenious beastliness, that deserves to make a box-office slaying here.

Then there is the rest of Yuletide. The Family Stone is the statutory Christmas package we unwrap each year with cries of "Oh no, you shouldn't have." No, Hollywood, you shouldn't. Spending money on expensive junk that, as soon as you are out of sight, we shall donate to the Oblivion Landfill is generous yet ill-advised. Diane Keaton - who else? - plays the cancer-doomed mother who takes her family under her wing for that last Noël in which everyone laughs, cries, screams and finally reaches a deeper wisdom. Talented performers - Claire Danes, Luke Wilson, Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex and the City (effecting a nice career chicane by playing a repressed daughter-in-law-to-be) - queue up for the chance to pull their crackers and spill their mottoes.

In America Christmas is a blend of Aeschylus and Norman Rockwell. In Britain it is more like a warmed-over Lassie movie. By coincidence we have just that. The sold-to-a-toff collie who keeps returning to her penniless Yorkshire owners, traversing more miles than an Antarctic penguin, is charismatically played by the dog Mason, a sort of Greta Garbo with fur. (A dog called Dakota, equally glamorous, did the stunts.) Peter O'Toole, in his gurning and churning style, lends some extracurricular madness. Young Jonathan Mason - no relation to the lead - has a stellar north-country precocity as principal boy.

At the press show for Screaming Masterpiece the distributors were Christmas-spirited to a fault. They tried to disarm our critical faculties by serving mince pies. They could not know that I have few faculties to disarm when it comes to documentaries about Icelandic pop and rock music. Its history, its attributes, its Weltanschauum are all touched upon, with an introduction and intermittent narration by the country's "Head Pagan". Mostly, though, it is concert footage and sensory assault. Film of the young Björk is captivating and proves that her dress sense was revolutionary even in the early days. Elsewhere a little goes a long way, and after a little so did some audience members.

KING KONG (12A)

Peter Jackson

THE FAMILY STONE (PG)

Thomas Bezucha

LASSIE (PG)

Charles Sturridge

SCREAMING MASTERPIECE (15)

Ari Alexander