Red Cliff
Looking for Eric
The End of the Line
Doghouse
The Last House on the Left
The Hangover

Films about the past have no power as drama unless they are about the present too, and also, in a fashion, about the future. Even in the 208 AD China depicted in John Woo’s Red Cliff we have to believe, as if we were living it, that something is at stake: not just our filmgoing senses, tied to a post as the flames of historical conflagration leap and lick around us, but the destiny of a people, a nation, or simply a set of characters we warm to and identify with.

Red Cliff gets everything right – sensationally right – except this one vital pulse of engagement. The battle scenes in the truth-torn tale of a China riven by conflict, as a tyrannous prime minister tries to subdue allied armies from east and south, are to die for in every sense. Hails of arrows cross-hatching the sky; hell-bent cavalries colliding in visions of carnage; a naval fleet torched in an infernal seascape worthy of J.M.W. Turner. And bodies hurtle skyward or earthward in a thrilling, beautiful, non-stop ballet of gravity submission or defiance.

To die for: Tony Leung in John Woo’s ‘Red Cliff’

But doesn’t that “beautiful” give it away? Woo has had a strange career: he started in Hong Kong with action films so dynamic and virtuosic they became a cult (Hard Boiled); then he crossed the Pacific to make lively Hollywood no-brainers (Face/Off, Mission Impossible 2). His second-world-war film Windtalkers suggested a thoughtful artist in hiding, but Red Cliff, made in China with Chinese actors and dialogue, suggests that artist is still hiding, possibly occluded behind the fireworks of style.

Woo gives us Kurosawa kinetics without Kurosawa’s clasp on our hearts and minds. The main characters – though starrily cast with Tony Lust, Caution Leung as the allies’ general and Takeshi Warlords Kanejiro as their strategist – are faces on moving tapestries. The fate of China is merely a device to advance the story. We seldom experience the emotional costs and rewards of defeat or victory. Even the echoes of more recent conflicts – Pearl Harbour, Omaha Beach – are flickers on the sensation meter. Mainly we sit there, jaws open, watching a spectacle that comes dangerously close to the video-game syndrome noted in last week’s Terminator Salvation: the remorseless triumph of effect over affect, though you must go a long way to see effects more dazzling than Woo’s.

Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric makes us wonder if British filmmakers have had a collective cranial lobotomy. With this frivol about a twice-divorced postal worker (Steve Evets) having a fantasy friendship with footballer Eric Cantona, Loach follows Mike Happy-Go-Lucky Leigh into the zone of the feelgood, featherbrained film. Scripted by Loach regular Paul Laverty, the movie is instantly evanescent. It seems the fruit of a fatal “yes”: the affirmative response Loach made when Cantona contacted him to indicate a wish to work together. What on earth could the gritty director of Riff Raff and Raining Stones come up with? Nothing on earth, it turns out: more something conjured from the high, fey ethers of wish-fulfilment whimsy.

Eric 1 (Evets) is in the midst of a falling-apart life – a departed second wife still pined for, a stepson in trouble with a local gangster – when he is taken in hand by the France and Manchester United footballer. Eric 2 becomes his hallucinated mentor, spouting the nonsense of the celebrity sage (“He that sows thorns shall reap prickles”), recalling great days in the stadium (“In every game I tried to make them a gift”) and inspiring a climactic masked raid on the gangster’s home by Eric 1’s work pals which puts a fresh spin on the phrase “going postal”. Cantona’s star quality, around which the film is built, is not in doubt. But after his famous off-pitch karate kick years ago and the great single-sentence press conference that followed – that Sphinx-like utterance about seagulls and sardine trawlers – it never was.

As surely as birds follow boats, ravening for scraps, the globe-roaming documentarist flies in the wake of the latest eco-issue. The End of the Line, directed by Rupert Murray, feeds on the awful warnings contained in writer-journalist Charles Clover’s homonymous book: the oceans are over-fished and we are depleting stocks to a point of no recovery.

The vision is positively Nietzschean. Cod is dead, slain by Mammon. The marketing greed of supermarket suppliers has blood on its hands. If we want cod back, we must encourage Him by doing our bit for responsibly sourced shopping, while asking world governments to put larger parts of the sea off-limits to commercial fishing.

The special underwater preserves that exist are depicted here as multicoloured paradises of coral rock and finny variety – real-life theme parks where the theme is fish – which seems a bit incongruous for refuges where the main aim is to restore a population for slaughter. Are we allowed to love what we plan to kill and eat? Perhaps we are. Or perhaps it is the cunning sentimentality of the filmmaker, hooking the viewer in with heartwarming pictures before throwing him into the good-causes basket.

That it is a good cause is indisputable. I emerged from the press show to learn from a newspaper that one famous high street food chain had that very day – spurred by the documentary – forsworn bluefin tuna, the poster star for seafood-in-distress. Perhaps the menus of the restaurant Nobu will follow, castigated in the film for asterisking their endangered seafood rather than banning it. “You talkin’ to me?” . . . Yes, Robert De Niro, Nobu co-owner, we are talking to you.

Men, like fish, gather in shoals and move about the world with a mixture of vague but macho purpose and showy menace. Three films this week argue that the male of the species is dumber than the female, if sometimes more colourful. In Britain’s Doghouse (comedy horror), an all-male driving weekend ends in a time-warped village where the female population has turned into zombies. Daft but fun. In The Last House on the Left (splatter thriller), a group of low-life psychopaths go head to head with the father (Tony Goldwyn) of a girl they have brutalised. Nasty but sometimes effective. In the cheeriest movie, The Hangover (comedy), four Los Angeles knuckleheads drive to Las Vegas for a bachelor party and wake up “the morning after” in a trashed hotel suite full of obscure clues to the preceding Armageddon. With no immediate idea what happened they must reconstruct it, partly to help the cops, partly to pacify a flaky Oriental hoodlum found locked in their car boot. Laugh? Well, at least, on a tough Tuesday in Tube-meltdown London, one chuckled.