Robinson In Ruins

Psychogeography, the form of intellectual rambling practised by writers like Iain Sinclair and Will Self, has had some prominence in recent years. At its best it has provided suggestive and surprising accounts of Britain's marginal landscapes.

The film-maker Patrick Keiller has long been cinema's most prominent psychogeographer, beginning with London (1994) and continuing with Robinson in Space (1997). Robinson in Ruins, the third installment in this trilogy, continues with the same technique as the two earlier films; a series of lengthy static shots of the often forgotten parts of a landscape (here Oxfordshire), over which a narrator recounts the movements and thoughts of the fictional Robinson, a cerebral and possibly subversive flaneur, who is the imagined cinematographer of the film.

There are moments of unexpected beauty – a field of legally grown opium poppies, lichen growing on a motorway sign – and some fascinating historical digressions, but ultimately the film struggles to keep our attention. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]