Beyond The Clouds, Michelangelo Antonioni's return to cinema after more than a decade, is the film no one ever expected to see. In 1985 he had a stroke that left him virtually mute and paralysed in one arm. He talks now only through his wife Enrica. So sure was everyone that this was the end that his home town opened a museum and, in 1995, he frailly travelled to Los Angeles to receive a Lifetime Achievement Oscar.

And yet at the same time, aged 83, Antonioni was back behind the camera, marshalling a large, star-studded cast with customary authority. When Wim Wenders, erstwhile darling of the serious film set, was drafted to stand insurance, it was widely assumed the maestro would be present in name only, content to let the German pretender handle the donkey-work. (What would Paris, Texas be without Antonioni?) In the event there was a falling out of sorts and Beyond The Clouds arrives with Antonioni's name written through it like a stick of rock.

It's a tetralogy, short stories taken from the director's own collection The Bowling Alley on the Tiber, and linked by a characteristically dour John Malkovitch as the Director, wandering Italy and France, ruminating on cinema and his place within it. These sections, also culled from Antonioni's writings and helmed by Wenders, are chiefly appealing for their acute pastiche. The first finds Malkovitch flying to Ferrara (site of that museum; they take their artists seriously over there) and straight into the same fog that blanketed the most memorable moments of 1982's Identification of a Woman; the intervening years telescope.

But if Wenders' work is laudatory, Antonioni's is immediately all his own. If there were lingering doubts over whose hand, however shaky, were on the tiller, they are immediately dispelled by the first tale: Chronicle of a Love Affair that Never Existed. Kim Rossi Stuart and Ines Sastre meet twice in three years, and twice he rejects her sexual overtures.

What we remember most of L'Avventura and many of those that followed is the juxtaposition of performer and place: Antonioni is a fantastically architectural film-maker. When we think of this first story we think less of the rather half-hearted playing (this is by far the weakest) than the architecture of Ferrara. It is no less true when the film moves to the particularly beautiful Portofino of The Girl, the Crime. Rain-soaked, out-of-season (more trademarks), Malkovitch sees Sophie Marceau in a side-street. He follows her. Later she approaches and confesses the murder of her father. They make love. Antonioni writes that he starts with an image and 'works back to a state of affairs'.

The third - Don't Look For Me - is more animated. Paris. Roberto (Peter Weller) is seduced by the striking Olga (Chiara Caselli), and over three years passion becomes obsession, destroying his marriage. Jean Reno returns home to his stunning glass-walled apartment to find his own wife has taken their furniture. These people will soon collide.

It is hard to divorce Weller from his B-movie career, fine actor though he can be (Cronenberg's Naked Lunch), and thus honours, perhaps unfairly, go to the bearish Reno in a wonderfully deadpan performance. There is melodrama here (particularly in Fanny Ardent's wronged wife), but there is also a sly humour that lifts the film's second half.

Indeed, this is a film that improves as it unfolds, and the last, This Body of Dirt, is much the best. In it, a young woman (Irene Jacob) brushes past Niccolo (Vincent Perez) on the street in Aix-en-Provence, and he follows her. She tells him that she is going to Mass. They talk along the way. He falls in love.

A slight tale, it comes alive through Perez's obvious passion, and Jacob's candour. Her pay-off line is both funny and horrifying and delivered with straight-faced sincerity. She was cast, unseen, from Three Colours Red, and certainly she's better here than she has been for anyone since Kieslowski. With a look she is able to convince us that these things matter, and in a film like this, that is all we have.

Beyond The Clouds is no late-flowering masterpiece. It is episodic and Wenders' inserts swing between affection and affectation (the last is superb). Some of the music choices swamp, and the early performances are variable. But all of that said, it still remains very much the work of a master film-maker. No one frames like Antonioni, shoots buildings quite the same; that his work is so clearly not Wenders' is evidence enough. And nor is it the embarrassment it could so easily have become, for while it is not up there with L'Avventura and The Passenger - it is at least as good as the later films like Identification, or his best known, Blow-Up. Arguably old-fashioned in its formality and meditation, composed and silent in ways that film-makers these days seem all too reluctant to attempt, but that cannot deny its gravitas, a certain stately quality that the art-house has lost in the last decade. If he is restating themes then they are at least ones in need of restating in our post-Tarantino cinema.