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The Turner Prize exhibition, Tate Britain

 Selective Memory: Scotland and Venice, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005 ©Cathy Wilkes/Ruth Clark Photography

I hated the Turner Prize exhibition last year: I went with my mum and dad to see the show at Tate Liverpool, where it took place to mark Liverpool's year as City of Culture, and left feeling that Liverpool had been distinctly short-changed. Only Zarina Bhimji's photographs had engaged the mind at all, Nathan Coley's installations seeming to me the emptiest kind of conceptual art, the sort of cartoonery, heavily reliant on words, that gives contrmporary art a bad name, and Mark Wallinger, whose earlier work had impressed me (he was shortlisted in 1995 for a really arresting series of works obsessed with horses, racing and racing colours), being represented only by that video of him walking round Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie in a bear suit. It was a small and for the most part silly exhibition that made me feel I'd wasted my parents' time. As a fan of the Turner Prize I was disappointed to have to agree that what we'd seen was a load of old rubbish. I was very glad it had been free.

So I'm pleased this year's exhibition is better. It'd be astonishing if anyone liked everything up for the Turner Prize in any year, and sure enough, some of this year's show I found uninspiring:  Goshka Macuga's glass and steel bar installations looked pleasant enough, but said little to me, and I found her collages a bit repellent. Mark Leckey's projections were reasonably interesting, especially the still, slightly sepia-shaded one of a room with a cat, and his moulded "poster" for an exhibition at Tate Modern was very pleasing in a modernistic way, but I didn't quite "get" his work, like the film about cats and the strange jungle video in which people seemed to melt into a huge chocolate fountain. Mm.

Much more interesting, though, were Cathy Wilkes, whose installation I Give You All My Money does at least make you think about women's lives, even if some of the imagery - the use of shop-window mannequins, the fact that one of them has her head in a cage - is a bit obvious. I think the connection of some of these standard ideas about women's self-image with the world of work, the idea of the conveyor belt of the checkout and of the consumerist process, is what makes the work interesting, as well as the mystery about whether the artists herself drinks coffee substitute or is merely making a point.

Best by a mile in this show, though, was Runa Islam, I thought. Film installations aren't always satisfying. Too often they are samey, using the same tired techniques and proceeding at the same, very stately speed, making you desperate to see a real film by a real film-maker. But some film and video art achieved what ordinary dramatic cinema can't, and standing in relation to it as poetry does to prose. Isaac Julien's work is an example of that, I'd say, as is the best of Sam Taylor-Wood's films, Jane and Louise Wilson's eery, empty films of machinery and places, and Bill Viola's amazingly timeless video canvasses. After seeing this exhibition, I'd put some of Runa Islam's work in that category. Certainly, Be the First to See What You See as You See It is a mesmerising silent or near-silent film, as much concerned with the use of colour - gorgeous china and sky blues are used and combined with white in a very studied way - and with sound and its absence, as it is with seeing, consciousness, or whatever else the blurb says. It's one of those rare arty videos you are transfixed by - I could have watched it several times - and is by a mile the best work in this show. First Day of Spring, which focused on an unreal, excessively still and silent colleactive break by rickshaw men in and Indian city park, was also worth watching although less compelling; it conveyed a strong sense of place, and some sense of personality and society, in spite of there being little movement or sound. Her third work was a more predictable moving lens surveying a meaningless industrial scene, to the sound of a fork-lift truck, but I forgave her - the other works, especially Be the First..., are strong enough to justify her getting the prize, in my view. I'd find any other result hard to understand.

I'm sure some people will think £7 a bit steep for what you get, and I wouldn't say this was one of the best Turner Prize shows - not like 1998 and 1999. But at least you can spend a good hour here without feeling cheated or bored, and if the public feedback boards tell you anything, as many people will discover at least one interesting artist as will think the whole thing's tosh. What a relief after last year.