Playtime @ Cornerhouse, Manchester

The first time I visited Playtime, the last exhibition ever to be mounted at Cornerhouse (before it moves to its new HOME), it was the opening weekend last November and Naomi Kashiwagi was staging the odd, am-drammy performance Puffin Crossing Carousel, supposedly inspired by the final scene of Jacques Tati’s film Playtime. Indeed all of the works in the show purport to take not only the demise of the Oxford Road building but also this film as their starting point. Gallery One is taken up by two works from Gabriel Lester. Frozen curtains hang from the hallway windows; they are quite nice but quite forgettable. It would be great to be able to see them from the street – or if the windows really were smashed out.

In the gallery proper a series of swing doors navigate you through the space. They go clickety clack but little else. Perhaps if there were other works in the room, giving you different angles and sensory experiences afforded by the doors, then this would be more interesting; instead, you are simply churned out the other end. On this repeat encounter, Gallery Two is a bit broken. Rosa Barba’s One Way Out (2009), which had been the most diverting work on my first visit, is now silent and still. They are waiting for a technician. White-shirted, black-trousered identical men run about empty modernist architecture in Niklas Goldbach’s film Habitat C3B (2008). Filmed in the 'Front de Seine' – the district was built in the 1970s and was a result of Georges Pompidou's attempt to modernise the city – it is unclear what these men are chasing; are they frenzied accountants that perhaps drank too much energy drink on their lunch break? Elsewhere, Andy Graydon has recorded the sounds from galleries and museums all over the world; you can play them on turntables, which works as an idea more than a reality.

Upstairs is another Kashiwagi work, Swingtime (2014), consisting of a set of swings that are supposed to trigger pre-recorded sounds as you swing on them (though at this time the only sounds really produced are the squeaks of the mechanism). Shannon Plumb’s video Madison and E. 24th Street (2008) is a surprise pleasure, however, and a work I had not really noticed on my first visit. We watch a flustered businessman fail to catch a cab on a busy city street. Check out Plumb's website, which is full of delicious excerpts from her other videos.

The problem with Playtime is the politeness of it. I sort of want to see the place cathartically sledge-hammered. Instead there is a little hole drilled between Galleries Two and Three – which is fine, but doesn’t seem quite enough.