Avis Metacritic

A rigorous, agile, scathingly funny reckoning with a city and society in the last stages of decline.

Robinson's very name ties him to explorers like Crusoe and Walden, but he is also something like JLG's whispering leftist prankster who butted into 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her to intermittently spout rhetoric over images of freeways and construction sites.

Keiller's follow up to his cine-essays London and Robinson In Space is another intelligent, thought-provoking piece of filmmaking.

Although rich in ideas and always compelling to look at, writer-helmer Patrick Keiller's latest semi-experimental pic Robinson in Ruins reps a minor disappointment after his outstanding, same-veined previous works, "London" and "Robinson in Space."

Comparable works like John Gianvito's "Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind," or nearly anything from cine-essayist Chris Marker's oeuvre, mine similar territory much more rewardingly.

An exaltation of life counters the intimations of extinction, trumping the polemical despair.