“This is an emergency. Homicides in Chicago, Illinois have surpassed the death toll of American special forces in Iraq.” This news bulletin forms the opening of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, pronounced Shy-Rack, a stylised, bombastic take on the gang violence that’s decimating Chicago’s South Side (7,916 Americans have been killed there since 2001, as opposed to 6,888 in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes in which women ended the Peloponnesian war by withholding sex, Lee’s advice is for the ladies of the ‘hood to do the same until their men have put down their guns. Or, as the sisters have it, “No peace, no pussy”.

Just like the original, Chi-Raq, co-written with Kevin Willmott, is mainly in verse – yes, verse, though there’s a hiphop/rap soundtrack as well, featuring R Kelly and Mali Music, among others. Samuel L Jackson is Dolmedes, a one-man Greek chorus (pictured below). “Welcome to Chi-Raq, land of pain, misery and strife,” he begins, swinging a cane and wearing the first of a selection of pimped-up suits, ties and hats. Lysistrata (the vibrant Teyonah Parris, recently in Dear White People and formerly Don Draper’s secretary in Mad Men) is the girlfriend of gangsta rapper Demetrius “Chi-raq” Dupree (Nick Cannon), head of the Spartan gang, locked in rivalry with the Trojans, led by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes with an eye-patch and a weird giggle).

She is OK with the gang-banging status quo – “Everyone here got a man bangin’ and slangin’ / fighting for the flag / and risking that long zip of the cadaver bag". Then an 11-year-old girl is killed (off-screen – we don't see much violence) in a drive-by shooting. (Last year – in real life – a nine-year-old boy was killed as part of gang retaliation.) The girl’s mother, in a moving performance by Jennifer Hudson, whose mother, brother and seven-year-old nephew were killed in 2008 in gang-related murders (real-life again), scrubs the blood, hyper-real, crimson and foamy, off the pavement. She appeals for witnesses but no one comes forward, even after the local church, led by Father Mike Corrigan (John Cusack, looking very white) offers a reward. Corrigan is based on celebrated Chicago activist Father Michael Pfleger, who was a consultant for the movie and whose foster son was killed by gunfire.

Lysistrata is horror-struck and moved to act, influenced by intellectual Miss Helen (the formidable Angela Bassett, who was also in Lee’s Malcolm X and is now in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close to the Enemy). In one of the more thought-provoking scenes, Miss Helen sees off a vile life-insurance salesman who’s pressurising her to take a policy out on her nephew. Lysistrata unifies the women of the two gangs – this is strictly musical-fantasy land, so nothing makes much sense – and gets them to agree to “deny all rights of access and entrance” because "saving lives is our job, it’s ‘bout breaking strife / givin’ da hood da true meaning of life”. Soon the no-peace-no-pussy cause goes global – Brazil, Lahore, Santo Domingo, Montreal and more are all in on it.

There’s plenty of raunchy dancing, singing, craziness and sex, with strip-joints unable to open because of the edict: “The situation’s out of control / Because I’m in front of an empty stripper pole,” proclaims Dave Chappelle in a cameo, not very funnily. It’s all frenzied, dazzling and finally empty, in spite of Corrigan’s impassioned words from the funeral pulpit about self-inflicted genocide and mass incarceration as a “legal form of lynching”, as well as a scene where real women holding up pictures of their dead children surround Chi-raq.

But Lee doesn’t tackle any of the complex reasons for gun violence – the fracturing of gangs, leaving them leaderless and anarchic; the hopelessness of young men without prospects; the dismantling of public housing. He thinks he can reach more people in a feature film (it’s the first production by Amazon Original Movies) than with a documentary. But why? Lee’s HBO doc about New Orleans after Katrina, When the Levees Broke, was a triumph and gave people a voice. Sadly, I can’t imagine that Chi-Raq is going to reach Lee’s intended demographic – the gang members – nor inspire them to lay down their guns.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Chi-Raq

Back in the 1980s Jim Jarmusch was a breath of fresh air. He made quiet, quirky films about young urban Americans that dispensed with the prevailing neon-bright high school romances, jocks and suburbia. He was about as far removed from the John Hughes/John Landis/Porky hit machines as you could get. Jarmusch was saturated in obscure B-movies, modern poetry and played in a band. His breakout feature, Stranger than Paradise, starred the then unknown John Lurie, who over the course of the film drifted from a cold New York to a frozen Cleveland and emerged blinking in the stale sunshine of Florida.

Jarmusch once worked as a teaching assistant to the great Nicholas Ray and shares his collaborative way of working with his performers. He cast musicians like Iggy Pop, Tom Waits and Joe Strummer and unfamiliar foreign actors like Roberto Benigni and Masatoshi Nagase. Fond of the static frame and low angles of Japanese directors like Ozu, Jarmusch’s films were a laconic, sideways contemplation of an America that had slipped out of view. They were sly, funny, lyrical and subtly perceptive portraits of romances between men and women and friendships between men who had got a little bit lost. He grasped the auteur mantle and kept creative control of his films, often shot in monochrome and kept his budgets low. Jarmusch was the quintessential indie director. 

Sadly it’s a return to format, not form

When he moved into colour with Mystery Train and Night on Earth, he brought something of William Eggleston’s unnerving vision to the screen. But then came too much critical acclaim; his films became airless and obviously headed for the art house and festival circuit. A tendency to collaborate with actors who brought their own baggage – Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton – and engage in mutual self-indulgence, meant that I haven’t liked a Jarmusch film for a long time.

But there were high hopes of Paterson as it was widely heralded as Jarmusch getting back to his roots. Sadly it’s a return to format, not form. It does hark back to those early films in its emphasis on the poetry of the everyday, but in a stale, self-conscious way. Adam Driver steps in as a John Lurie look-alike, playing Paterson, a former marine turned bus driver who listens in to his passengers’ conversations. Paterson's a poet, and over the course of the week he handwrites his minimalist poems in a notebook between shifts of shuttling his bus around Paterson, a down-at-heel city in New Jersey. He shares the city's name, and sees beauty in its quiet ordinariness – much like William Carlos Williams did when he wrote his epic poem, also called Paterson.  

Unfortunately, the echoes, rhymes and coincidences that Jarmusch works into the film grow tiresome and ultimately lead nowhere. Paterson’s wife, played by the beautiful Iranian actress/musician Golshifteh Farahani (pictured above with Driver) dreams of having twin babies and her husband starts to see adult twins everywhere. As a movie, Paterson drifts along and never really gets going. There are neighbourly epiphanies and charmed encounters with black people in bars and launderettes. Paterson takes long walks with the couple's baleful English bulldog and finds domestic delight in his wife's monochrome cupcakes and hand painted shower curtain – it's meant to be enchanting but it's simply fey. 

What was charmingly loose-limbed in Jarmusch's earlier films now seems mannered and tired. The poems that scroll onto on the screen as Paterson's own work are by poet Ron Padgett and too opaque. In set dressing and dialogue Jarmusch namechecks two great city poets – Frank O’Hara and William Carlos Williams – and this backfires, making the on-screen poems' banality painfully obvious. In the final scene Masatoshi Nagase, who was so good in Sweet Bean, bumps into Paterson sitting on a bench overlooking the city's historic waterfall. Nagase is a middle-aged tourist who in another of the film's artful coincidences is a poetry fan on a pilgrimage to Paterson. Nagase was once the young punk in Mystery Train searching for Elvis's ghost in night-time Memphis; he's now a bespectacled, middle-aged man. Nagase's cameo appearance brought home the distance between Jarmusch young and old. In short, Paterson is a disappointment. 

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@saskiabaron

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Paterson

While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad).

A pale young girl – we see her blurred reflection in a window – is hanging out at a pizza joint. She follows a customer, Joe, a handsome young architect, out to his car, where he’s waiting for his order, and flirts with him, smoking and dancing beside the open window, asking him if he’s married. She's a teenage wastrel in her tiny shorts, ballet slippers and shiny jacket. Next thing – there’s no explicit sex on view – he’s paying for her services and heading home. But she’s taken note of his number-plate and we know there’s trouble ahead.

It's remarkable that the story of Seretse Khama, the king of Bechuanaland, isn't more popularly known, though Amma Asante's film may change all that. The movie opens in a smoggy, gloomy London in 1947, where Seretse (David Oyelowo) is completing his studies in law prior to returning to rule his homeland. Momentous change is in the air in the post-war world, as Europe struggles to rebuild and Indian independence signals sundown on the British Empire. 

First-person documentary must steer the uneasy path between embarrassing confessional, narcissistic self-obsession and work that will resonate beyond the merely parochial context of home movies. The dangers surrounding the genre are of course one of the sources of its potential strength. The intimacy that near-absolute subjectivity affords is a plus. And so is the thrill of perhaps getting a glimpse behind the personae of everyday life.

Name seven students in Ravenclaw. Which 14 subjects are on the syllabus at Hogwarts? Create a shopping list of 20 different types of magical sweet. In her Harry Potter stories JK Rowling conjured up an almanack of wizarding facts and figures which, for parents, proved extremely useful during long car journeys or steep mountain climbs (even if this parent didn’t know all the answers). A handy staple was “List 16 magical creatures”. It would keep them going for hours because, if memory serves, Rowling created only 14 of them.

Jim Jarmusch has made a memorial to the Stooges, more than a celebration of their brutal prime. His Zen rhythms, which roll so movingly through the upcoming Paterson, aren’t entirely equipped for the blunt trauma of Ron Asheton’s guitar, or Iggy Pop’s penchant for sultry chaos. He’s barely adequate journalistically on the band’s early years, but is on hand for their death, as hard living leaves almost no Stooge standing.

Paul Schrader is one of those filmmakers who critics really want to love. Not only is he responsible as a writer for at least two masterpieces – Taxi Driver and Raging Bull – he’s also the director of such great films as Mishima, American Gigolo and Light Sleeper.

Ewan McGregor has been judged unworthy of adapting Philip Roth in the US. But his directorial debut is finely crafted, and powered by visceral emotion embodied in one of his best performances. As Seymour “Swede” Levov, he’s an All-Jewish-American hero, living the 1950s dream, till the 1960s bring it crashing down. His beloved daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning, pictured below right) is the agent of his destruction, in a one-sided generation war unusually seen from the straight-edged parents’ side.