I caught up with Matthew Collings' What is Beauty? last night -- and I watched with admiration tinged with more than a touch of envy. This is the best film I've seen about the visual arts in, what, certainly the past year. Shown on BBC Two on Saturday (rush to your iPlayer now), it is elegant, thoughtful, surprising, stimulating, both simple and complex, and at times visually very beautiful. It's not perfect (the argument meanders a bit at times), and I'm cautious that I've already over-sold it to you. But bravo to all those involved.

The form of director Neil Crombie's film is a top ten personal list of Collings' 'laws' for beauty. Except that they're no such thing, but rather abstract principles (the ones in CAPITALS below)  that can help us approach and understand and even just talk about beautiful things. Although he brings in other works for comparison, what the list facilitates for Collings is a concentration on just ten key artworks, and the film draws much of its power from this constrained focus.

Collings' principles line up as follows: NATURE first, then SIMPLICITY. For the former, in a visually glorious sequence (main camera: Louis Caulfield) he hymns Norman Foster's viaduc de Millau in south-west France and then he changes gear to look with care and sympathy at Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto in Monterchi.

Much of the film is uncluttered and direct in its style and its presentation of artworks but there are moments when split-screen is effectively employed, as with a comparison of light in works by Rothko, Claude Lorrain, Turner and Tintoretto. This comes between Monterchi and Monreale, where Matthew Collings visits a Norman church with wonderful medieval mosaics to consider the principle of UNITY.

For TRANSFORMATION the film travels to the Pech-Merle grotto in the Dordogne and to the magical, marvellous cave paintings there. Then it's on to The SURROUNDINGS, where I wasn't quite sure of the argument (at least as it applied to beauty), although he pithily sums up his thoughts like this:

With the magic rituals of the cavemen, art specials up the space. With contemporary art, the space specials up the art.

Next up is ANIMATION, and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling -- 'a beauty experience I couldn't possibly leave out'. Then it's on to SURPRISE, with Magritte's The Reckless Sleeper, 1928, and a confident capsule analysis from Collings about its beauties and mysteries -- and about why it's more surprising than Picasso's The Three Dancers, 1925.

PATTERN follows, 'a way of organising visual experience so it looks nice'. One of the great strengths of the film is how it jumps around in time, juxtaposing as here works from antiquity with today, visually rhyming van Gogh with Pollock, Damien Hirst (the dots neatly deconstructed) and Roman mosaics (immaculately filmed in Tunis).

A major Rauschenberg from 1954, Charlene, is the focus for a soliloquy on SELECTION and on randomness and on the ways in which beauty is different across time because society is different, its hierarchies and beliefs and aspirations changing through the ages.

Finally SPONTANEITY takes Collings back to the human form and to individuals being themselves. Gauguin (Arearea, 1892, mostly) and Matisse (The Snail, 1953) are the artists here, and Collings returns to a question he poses at the top of the show, Is art beautiful because of what it's of or because of how it's done? The answer ('both') is of course far less interesting than the journey we've been on to get here. And there's a last sustained visual comparison between The Snail and Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto that is, well, once again very beautiful.

One more note. I'm not normally a fan of through-scoring (or nearly so) of documentaries but the music track here is as smart and imaginative as the rest of the film. Apart from anything else, What is Beauty? sets the bar very high for two further films about the subject: Waldemar Januszczak's Ugly Beauty this coming Saturday and an essay from Roger Scruton the week after. Intriguingly, this feels like it's shaping up as a sort of heavyweight title bout between arts presenters. We'll be back.