LET’S HEAR IT for the lowest- grossing film franchise in history.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Charles Baudelaire postulated a new kind of citizen, "a botanist of the sidewalk", who would both occupy and make meaning of his urban surroundings. More than a century after the philosopher's death, architect- turned-film-maker Patrick Keiller would emerge as Baudelaire's flâneur par excellence. His Robinson travelogues – London(1994) and Robinson in Space(1997) – are strange, otherworldly walkabouts around decaying structures and pastoral retreats.

Together, these film essays occupy a curious corner of movieverse, an odd suburb where we might find Chris Marker's La Jetéeand various film installation pieces. Narrative is confined to a wry voiceover, which recounts the travails of the narrator's friend Robinson, a reclusive, unseen academic out to disentangle the "problem" of Englishness.

Robinson in Ruinssees Vanessa Redgrave on narration duties, recounting Robinson's adventures around substations, Roman relics and military bases. Where the first two films freely associated around the disastrous consequences of Thatcher's social and economic policies, Robinson in Ruinspicks at the permanent scars left by her regime and (in related news) the current excesses of capitalism.

Our invisible hero’s first instinct is to follow the money through gas lines and pension plans and sinister-sounding investment opportunities. The Iraq war looms over the enterprise as he traces a history of US military presence on British soil, from cruise missiles to private enterprise.

Lengthy pillow shots of flowers and meadows lull the viewer into alpha waves between loosely connected, slyly polemical tangents. This is a film about lichens on road signs, former UN inspector David Kelly, railways, Roman occupation, American occupation, the IMF, meteors, banks, roving multinationals, symbiotic Darwinism, epicurean democracy and a whole lot more besides.

Its diversions, however numerous, are less important than the places it visits. For Keiller, the landscape is the movie; an ugly branch of Lidl, replete with its ugly employment practices, is granted the same profound, poetic framing as the dilapidated castles and Gulf War refueling stations.

The results are too thoughtful, too spacey, too off-grid to be confused with a campaigning film. Robinson in Ruinsisn't angry – it's just really, really disappointed in us.