Bodies moving through space is literally the entire point of Alfonso Cuarón’s awe-inspiring survival thriller, so to shoot it in three dimensions must have been a no-brainer. In its perfectly plotted sinuous long takes (the opening shot is 17 minutes long), cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki snakes the camera around Sandra Bullock’s stranded astronaut and the wreckage of her shuttle, personalising the disaster, and raising the stakes to almost unbearable levels.  The prehistoric paintings in the Chauvet Cave in southern France – the oldest human artworks yet uncovered – might seem like an unlikely subject for the 3D treatment. But this poetic documentary from the maverick German filmmaker Werner Herzog recasts the paintings as a form of early cinema, showing how the cave walls’ curves and contours made the images seem to come alive in the play of firelight. On a flat surface, the effect would have been impossible – and Herzog, ever the primitivist, happily follows in our distant ancestors’ creative footsteps.  When it’s used well, 3D can make a tall tale seem realer by giving it volume and scale – although when it’s sloppily done, with characters and props standing up like flat cardboard cut-outs against an indistinct, soupy backdrop, it can draw awkward attention to phoniness. (See Clash of the Titans, Alice in Wonderland, and so on.)  Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning fantasy is a perfect example of the former: Pi’s magical voyage takes place in a tangible world, with the ocean stretching towards the horizon in a way that makes you feel the open space.  Another ingenious trick: during certain sequences including the flying fish ambush, Lee narrows the image slightly so that the creatures can visually leap out of the image and drop through the black space beneath it – it’s as if they’ve flopped right out into the cinema.  Interview: Robert Zemeckis on his 3D film The Walk, and the future of cinema  The most purely creative use of 3D to date came in this addictively impossible abstract collage-film from the 84-year-old Jean-Luc Godard. It’s about two couples, or maybe one, engaged in a destructive romantic affair/affairs, and Godard uses the plot’s doubling and coupling to riff ingeniously on the fragile nature of the stereoscopic image.  Among its many visual innovations are moments in which the left and right "channels" of the image uncouple from each other and start looking at completely different things, allowing you to flick between the scenes at will by winking. More than half a century after Godard first embraced the jump-cut in Breathless, he invented the D.I.Y. version.  It’s remarkable just how little measurable cultural impact James Cameron’s multi-billion-dollar-grossing science fiction has had in the six years since its release. The movies are still full of copycat Aliens and Terminators – even officially branded ones – but the forests of Pandora have, since 2009, been mostly left untouched.  The exception, of course, is Avatar’s introduction of modern 3D filmmaking techniques, which were seized upon by Hollywood in its wake, presumably as Cameron hoped they would be – although the depth and beauty of the films that followed rarely measured up to his catalytic work.  To get a sense of Cameron’s hubristic ambitions for the film, just look at the images with which he bookends it: a single eye flicking open at the start, and two at the end. In a little under three hours, straightforward looking evolves into binocular vision in all its glory.
Robert Zemeckis has done it with The Walk. But which other contemporary films just aren't as good in two dimensions?